Storage Stuff
Today the moving truck arrived with our stuff from NYC. To be totally accurate, it arrived in two 24’ trucks, one with furniture and one filled to the brim with boxes. These trucks appeared on time at 8:00am (they drove down from their terminal in L.A.) and came with six very nice moving guys who stayed and went above and beyond helping us with rugs and moving furniture. They were on site for six hours including a one hour lunch break, spent under our back palapa in the shade with a lovely 70 degree Southern California breeze blowing. Let’s start with a little math. This cross-country move (excluding the packing up of the apartment and taking some TV’s, artwork and a few pieces of furniture out to my kids in the outer boroughs) cost me $9,000. In fairness, we did not shop this bid, but just accepted it. Kim had a rapport with this company of off-duty firemen and they were her guys to the end. So, for that fee, this freight moving company took possession of these 350 boxes and 15 or so pieces of furniture and put it on a cross-country truck to their terminal in L.A., where they undoubtedly have lots of storage and lots of truck loading docks. If it took them four days to go across the country, that means they stored the stuff for five or six days in metro NYC and for five or six days in metro L.A. I figure the transport costs about $3,000 ($1/mile) and $1,000 for storage ($100/day) on both sides of the country. The crew cost $2,000 for the day and the trucks for the day were $500. That means that the freight company, besides all the overhead coverage imbedded in all those amounts, makes $2,500 or 28% gross margin for their trouble. That all makes sense to me…unfortunately.
All that furniture got put more or less into place in the house where we had been planning on it. That would be two rooms of guest room furniture, an office-worth of furniture and miscellaneous pieces here and there. Lots of artwork and favorite antiquities and objects were set out for wall and hanging suggestions. A few pieces of furniture have no home yet and are in the garage for consideration, as we knew they would be. There are 3-6 boxes in each of five rooms in the house, and that leaves about 200 boxes with God-Knows-What sitting in a tidy stack in that same garage. Some of that is clothing. Some is kitchen stuff. And the rest is just stuff. It’s hard for me to imagine that we had that much stuff in a 1,500 square foot NYC apartment after giving a bunch of it to the kids. We triaged a bunch of stuff out the door in NYC to a few favorite charities (service people we know who liked getting free stuff). We triaged a bunch of California stuff to vacate the rooms we have now filled up. Some went to relatives of relatives, but lots also just got tossed out. Granted, Kim ran short of time and didn’t triage everything and expected to do more of that out here. In fact, given the difficulty of proper disposal of certain items, Kim specifically included in the move, several boxes of stuff to be recycled out here where its easier to get it to the recycling center. I don’t even want to think about the carbon footprint of that one.
As for all that stuff that has to find its way into this house somewhere, I can imagine about 75 boxes of useful stuff (I’m just spitballing here), which means if there are 5 boxes of recyclables, we are still in need of triaging 120 boxes of stuff, crap, stuff we barely need or don’t need at all. That would be stuff that will just clutter our lives and slow us down one way or another.
What most people do at this point is to rent a storage room and kick that can down the road for resolution at some distant future date. I hate storage rooms. I refuse to use storage rooms for any longer than for three months of transition, and even that bugs me since I live in fear of a storage room wiggling its way into my life. I will admit that I am cheating somewhat. While we have no attic or basement here in the land of slab houses, I do have an extra-large three-car garage with three sides of wire racks with all my motorcycle gear, Christmas decorations, tools, extra tables and chairs and….wait for it….a wrapping station for Kim to do her gift-wrapping. If truth be told, I also have a brother-in-law with a warehouse that houses my motorcycle trailer, which I use at least once a year.
One of the story ideas I’ve harbored for some time is to write a series of short stories that are set in a NYC storage room facility. I think there’s a fascinating financial story about how very conservative family groups (often Hasidic Jews) who invest their money long-term in parking garages and storage room facilities. What they like about it is that its a solid revenue stream that makes the properties cash flow positive almost from day one (very easy conversions involved) and then they hold the properties long-term, sometimes for generations, to accrete value and to sell only when there is a specific need and there has been considerable appreciation. Positioning yourself to hold an investment until it is good for you to sell is one of the smartest financial plays that exist. Its right up there with Warren Buffet’s buy value and hold strategy that has made him Uber wealthy.
Anyway, what I have in mind in that short story series is to keep that financial brainstorm as background and make the real story about all the things that go on in storage rooms. Two stories I particularly harbor and want to develop are the one about the Ethiopian immigrant who runs a bootstrapped version of street Amazon, all from his storage room warehouse, that doubles as a shipping depot and a bank vault. He takes his wares out to sell on the street every day with his team of corner salesmen and he keeps his overhead low and flexible. The other story is about the guy whose wife wont let him smoke his cheap cigars at home anymore. Actually, there is almost nowhere you can smoke a stogie any more. So this guy rents a storage room. He buys a Hammacher Schlemmer mobile air purifier and electric ashtray. He orders a Wayfair over-stuffed chair, area rug and lamp/table. He gets a small Samsung flat-screen TV and he is all set. He has his storage room living room and just makes sure no one sees him go in and go out. For $200/month he has what others can’t buy in an apartment for $2,000/month for a studio. There may be a lot of stories in the naked city, but I think there are even more in the naked storage rooms of the City.
The way people handle their stuff and either store it or shed it tells you a lot about them. Now you all know I’m not having anything like a storage room if I can possibly avoid it. I think I damaged one marriage over that issue, so I tread with care around it. People do like their stuff, no matter how much it burdens them. I would contend that there is only one thing worse than excess stuff and that’s an abundance of storage since it leads to an abundance of extra stuff.