Moving, downsizing, long-term renovations, deceased estates and divorce are all factors in the relentlessly increasing demand for off-site storage
About once every six weeks I go to my least happy place. It’s a massive warehouse in the industrial back blocks of Port Kembla, near Wollongong in New South Wales, housing a storage facility called Super Easy Storage. Because it is a no-frills operation, it does not offer 24-hour access like the more upmarket companies do, so I have to call ahead to say I am coming, giving a minimum of three days’ notice so they can arrange to make our plywood crates available, shifting them to ground level from towering stacks that stretch in an endless cubist landscape of anonymous geometry.
The crates (which Super Easy calls modules or pods to make them sound groovier) contain the possessions my mother has brought with her as part of her decision to relocate to Australia from the UK after 60 years and live with us. A brutal cull reduced her possessions by two thirds, but she still brought 2,000 cookbooks, as well as a vast trilingual general library, a cumbersome early-model knitting machine she has not used in a decade but cannot bear to part with, extravagant quantities of china, canteens of cutlery, a battery of professional cookware sufficient to equip a small restaurant, enough fabric to open a shop, a collection of vintage luxury-brand handbags, the wardrobe of Marie Antoinette and all her furniture. Many pieces are fragile, obsolete, or of little value, except of the sentimental kind.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2LjOlcE
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