Ep 025 - Out of Sight, Out of Mind - Inventory Your Storage Units

Welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, where you'll discover strategies to save money, save time, and be better organized in managing your largest financial asset and biggest expense, your home. Your hosts, John Bodrozic and Beth Dodson, who are co-founders of HomeZada, have been supporting homeowners for over 20 years. They are here to share with you their tips and suggestions, as well as interviews with industry experts. With the goal of helping you become a smarter homeowner. Now here's your hosts, John and Beth.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. I apologize slightly for my voice. It's a little hoarse right now, but that's okay. We're going to get through this. Today, this is Beth and I'm with John. We are going to talk about Storage units and why, and other structures, and why it's important to inventory all the items in these units. And John, we've heard this from family friends. We've heard it from our customers who were paid as organizers or inventory professionals who are actually. Organizing and documenting via an inventory all the items in storage units because people forget what they actually have in these units. And some of the stories we've heard are crazy. But let's talk about these other units first. You know, one of the things that you and I were talking about is why do people have additional storage units and/or structures? to manage all this, these items that may not be able to fit or may not work inside their homes.

Yeah, absolutely. Storage is such a big thing, Elizabeth. There's even TV shows about—

Totally.

Storage units that are lost and forgotten and estates and all that kind of good stuff. But back, back to the crux of your question over why, I suppose there's more. I suppose there's multiple reasons, I guess. Maybe one of the basic ones is whatever your current home is, is not capable physically of storing the quantity of stuff that you want to keep.

Mm-hmm.

Therefore, you have to go down the street or across town and basically rent a storage unit.

Mm-hmm.

That's sort of the basic premise. And obviously, you know, why would people do that is because they value those things. They just don't have enough physical space in their current home to do it. So they're gonna store it somewhere else. I suppose then there's all the other kind of use cases where the storage units could be for water toys. You've got a boat and your house doesn't store the boat.

Oh yeah.

Or you've got jet skis or it's sort of like seasonal, right? Maybe another example is people who own vacation homes in mountain areas. Maybe they store all their fishing boat, fishing gear, ski stuff, whatever. Because they don't have enough space. Again, maybe they own only a condo, but they have a place that could be used in summer and/or winter. And so they're using the storage unit to store lifestyle things that people like to do— golf, skis, fishing, etc.

Yeah, I also see, um, I've heard from some of our customers, they are using storage units in a transitional move. So they're putting things in storage before they get to the next place because maybe they don't know exactly where that is. And we hear that from a lot of our military customers.

Yeah.

The other thing that we hear, um, and people moving from one location to another, like business executives as well, will do the same thing.

Yeah.

But we also hear from our military customers, um, one of the things that they are doing is they're using storage units when they have to work overseas. So they will find a property overseas that is fully furnished if they can and not move all of their items.

Okay.

Some people, they'll still move their items, but, excuse me, a lot of our military professionals say that they will store and keep their US-based items in the US. And then once they get deployed back to the US or repositioned back in the US, they will then go through that storage unit and pull it out and put it into a new property. But going overseas, they'll also store that.

Yeah, I've heard the exact same thing and you're absolutely correct. It's sort of when people are moving, there may be an interim move. I'm going from a house, I have to sell my house. My new job is relocating across the country. I'm just going to get an apartment for 6 months, but I'm going to put my stuff in storage until I figure out where do I buy my other house. And then, so it's a sort of a 2-part move in terms of why those storage units become valuable. I think also another use case that I've heard is it's essentially family members. It's kind of like that estate planning situation.

Totally.

Where maybe you, that you as the adult children may not be using the storage unit, but you're preparing a storage unit for your elderly parents who've accumulated lots of stuff. And again, maybe it's part of a downsizing thing, maybe it's part of an estate plan, lots of sort of different use cases over why people engage with storage units. And one other sort of thing that I've heard of, I don't know if you've heard it, out here in Northern California, people love their wine. I've heard of storage units that are climate controlled to store your wines.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So maybe there's even other specialized kinds of storage. Most of us think of storage as sort of a dumb space, right? It's an 8 by 8 with a roll-up door. And you just stick a bunch of boxes in there and you close the door and this, that, and the other. But given all the sort of things that people are interested in, maybe there's other unique storage. As we know that people who have boats, they need much bigger storage units. And people who have wine collections need climate-controlled storage units. So—

No, you're right on with that. And there's a lot of people that instead of remodeling their home to include a large climate-controlled wine area and risking like losing power or something to that effect, and it could taint the wine quality. They look at these wine storage organizations as a way to protect their investment because yes, there's a lot of people that believe wine is investment. I've also seen the same thing with a lot of art. Some of our customers have art, and even though they have the art on their walls. They bought some pieces and they're like, you know, I may not be in this house during a period of time and it is risky, so I'm going to take all that art and put it in a storage unit that is also climate controlled so I can protect it. And then when I get back, then I can put it back on the walls and then vice versa and stuff like that. Yeah, so makes sense. Well, there's a lot of items in storage. I think some of the things we've also heard is that To your point, when you're talking about elderly parents and putting some of their items in storage, I've heard this also from other clients. They have a home, they've chosen not to keep some of the furnishings that they have, but maybe they're antique or they've been passed down or what have you. But their kids want it. But their kids don't quite own a home yet.

Yeah.

And so they're like, well, I need this. And the family said, okay, they are heirlooms. So we will also put them in storage for you. Until you are ready to buy your own home and ready to collect them, and we can then move them into your home. And so I've seen a lot of different things. I've seen some wonky things where people forget what's in their storage units.

I think candidly, Elizabeth, that is the biggest thing that people struggle with, with managing their storage units.

Oh, you can't remember what was in them.

I personally think that, you know, it's sort of like, okay, let's get an 8 by 8 with a roll-up door, whatever size you want. You pay the amount, whether it's an annual or monthly fee. That's the easy part. The hard part is once you've put stuff in there, it's out of sight, out of mind. Time goes by, the human brain can't remember it. You're like, what's in there? I can't even remember it. And there's all the— we should probably get into all the different use cases of like, oh, I think it's there. I wanna go find something 'cause I need it. Or I wanna bring something from my house and store it there and I wanna take something back.

Mm-hmm.

So there's also what I call the inflow and the outflow. Flow and there's the static understanding of what's actually inside the unit, I'd say most humans completely forget about what's there.

Well, especially if they're putting, they're putting stuff in boxes. So they have like plastic bins or they have boxes that are, they're not see-through. You can't even remember what's in them.

Correct.

And so going into the unit, you're like, oh, now I got to open up all these boxes to figure things out when you could be taking photographs. Of what's in each box, and labeling a box one two three four five six seven eight nine ten whatever. And then you have an understanding of what's in the storage unit, and you can collect it when you need it or vice versa. But because people forget, this explains why these storage wars shows are so popular right now. You can totally understand without an inventory people have no idea, and they're like well. I don't remember. And if they don't, don't give the storage unit information to their family members, then their family members have no idea it even exists out there.

Correct. Yep. So that's also that— I, I think I've only seen a few episodes. I think it's about people who sort of pass away and they haven't allocated where to— told anybody about it. A storage unit's vacant. Maybe there's some sort of term in the lease that eventually it gets auctioned off.

Mm-hmm.

But you're absolutely correct. And I think that that's the— not knowing what's there and managing what I'm taking out and taking away is one of the biggest reasons why it's so important to do a home inventory. And you're absolutely spot on. It's, it's kind of— imagine going to your storage unit and you open that roll-up door. It's pretty easy, assuming it— the item is big enough that it stands on its own. You've got golf clubs, a bicycle, Maybe a spare mattress, bed frame, whatever furniture. Those things are pretty easy to visually identify.

Totally.

But it's the— because people are trying to sort of maximize the storage of that 8 by 8 unit, half or 3 quarters of the stuff is all put into boxes and the boxes are stacked. And you're like, you have no idea which box has the coin collection that you want to sell or You know, some sort of Christmas tree ornaments that you want to get out, whatever. And so having those things in an inventory that's available to you via phone, whether you— so that you can sort of see exactly what's inside that storage unit, I think becomes paramount to that sort of peace of mind because of that sort of constant retrieval and depositing of new stuff. And you're kind of rotating what you're storing there.

Yeah, and I think it's super easy to actually take an inventory of your storage unit simply by taking a bunch of pictures and going through some steps of what you really think is valuable and not. And it may actually help you purge it too, by the way, if you realize this isn't going to last any long, I need to get rid of it, and the kids turned out they didn't want it after all. So it's time to either sell the, the equip— the furniture or items, or it's time to give them away or gift them. And It could actually eventually help you reduce the fact that you need a storage unit, so it eliminates a bill eventually if that is the case. But having an inventory helps you understand what is in there and how to deal with that. And I gotta tell you, I've heard some crazy stories. I heard from one organizer when she was doing an inventory, she found the remains in cremation form— cremation form people— in an urn of a woman's previous husband, and she just forgot she put him in there because she wanted to display his ashes somewhere else. And I was like, hmm, that's interesting. But he was having fun because apparently the pets were in there too, and their ashes.

Yeah.

So they were having fun together.

Yeah, absolutely. And candidly, you know, I get asked occasionally, you know, how should I take an inventory of my storage unit when they use sort of HomeZada? And I guess, you know, what I try to tell people is there's sort of 2 options, right? You can create A separate property and call it the storage unit. And the way the hierarchy of HomeZada works is that you have a property and then you have multiple spaces and then items within a space. Yeah. So that, that goes back to your strategy of you could essentially create a space for each box.

Yeah.

Space is box number 1, box number 2, box number 3. You open up the box, you take a picture of everything that's in there. You could even use AI. It's going to determine all those things. And now you know what's in box 1, box 2, box 3, et cetera. Um, you know, that's probably the most efficient way. But candidly, the other way is somebody may have their primary property, their primary residence, and they just want to create a separate space called storage unit.

Totally.

Now the challenge there is hierarchy of the data is you now have each individual item, maybe box 1, box 2, box 3. But then you have, in order to open the box to know what's in it, you're going to have to use kind of like a description field and kind of type all that information out. And there's pros and cons to both approaches. I kind of tell customers that they can, you know, what those things are and let them choose what's most important to them.

Yeah, the flexible part of it. And I think I've even done both in my own use cases of different areas. So I don't have a storage unit, but I've got other kinds of areas that we need to track for. I mean, you need to track for sheds. Like people forget they put lawn mowers and other outdoor equipment in sheds. Sometimes they store outdoor furniture in sheds. Some people have she sheds that become offices or creative spaces, and just knowing what is in there is something that's important because if ever a she shed or any kind of shed catches fire, you still want to be reimbursed for what was in there. I do know like some people. That I've talked to have coworking spaces and they've created a space in their primary property and created whatever items they brought into their coworking space. I mean, maybe they brought in electronics, maybe they brought in an extra monitor, extra keyboard, those types of things. And they want to track all that information from that space. I mean, we've also heard— I'm trying to think of some other spaces that people— oh, we've heard customers create separate properties about their business office space. Maybe they lease a really small office and they're taking all the business items and information. They've got a printer in there, they got computers, they've got desks, etc., and they add those into a separate property about their business office, and that helps them understand what they have and how they can actually manage it. Have you heard of any other spaces people have also Added? I can't think of so many more.

Absolutely. I mean, it's— there's, you know, let's face it, we as humans, we're all different. So what's important to us in terms of where we are on in our life journey and all those kinds of things. There are people that, you know, are reasonably wealthy and they've got, you know, barns on their property.

Oh, that's right.

And tool sheds and a guest house, you know, what's the popular term? The ADUs now, adult dwelling units.

Mm-hmm.

Where you've built a separate structure for, you know, parents or rental property.

Yeah.

Or like you said, tool sheds. The list goes on and on. And yeah, even in, like you said, in their personal life, you know, I've had some people who say, hey, I'm in charge of my local church's inventory.

Oh, that's right. Yeah, we've heard that a lot.

Can I use your product to do that, right?

People have asked for church stuff.

Sure, yeah, you can create a property and it's like, Inventory what's in the church in terms of the artwork and the pews and whatever they wanted to kind of mentality. So it's the— there are things that people have sort of hobbies or passionate about that sometimes maybe a small local business or whatever the case may be, it's very easy to kind of inventory those things because those things are just as well equally as important as the storage unit.

Yeah. No, I agree with you. And so we look at the value of inventorying these items, and we talked briefly about that, but do you see any other reason or value to take an inventory of things in other structures?

Yeah, I guess I think, well, it's the, if the other structure is more than what I call dumb storage, meaning if it's got plumbing, electrical, mechanical equipment, if there's HVAC associated with it, Again, I'm not— I've been to a few barns in my life, but you could have a simple barn that's just basically covered and storage in there. Or you can have your horses inside.

But then you could have—

I've seen other barns that are a little more high-end where they're actually air-conditioned. There's a bathroom in there. They've got a little kitchenette in there because they're using it maybe not as a traditional barn people think about where you're housing animals, but you're using a barn space For other sort of events that you want to do, right? So it really depends on if, if your storage of those other things has all those mechanical, electrical, lighting, then you've got the maintenance aspect of that item.

Yeah.

Versus just the storage of the personal property that's inside that sort of physical structure, um, is sort of the other reason why inventorying those things gets into sort of the, the maintenance aspects. I'm pretty sure that there's probably an insurance aspect to it as well. Yeah, I'm not quite sure how insurance works of all of your stuff in a storage unit. It's not physically at your location. It's probably in the lease agreement is my guess.

It might be, but I can tell you on your property insurance, other structures are something on the property that you need to identify and you have a value for it. And those other structures can be everything from sheds to pools, barns, outdoor kitchens.

Yep.

That everybody's doing. It could be other seating areas, it could be fire pit area, it could be anything. And to rebuild that or to replace that is something that your insurance company requires you to provide them proof that you had it.

Yeah, absolutely. There's— when you think about every home in America is different, and, and not only are the inside contents different, but perhaps what's on the outside. And candidly, I think what we're sort of— another sort of thematic thing that we're talking about is when most people think about inventorying their primary residence, they think about what's inside the house.

Mm-hmm.

They don't think about inventorying the stuff that's outside the house that could either be A, attached to the primary house, or B, sort of all those other separate structures that are on their house because they've got sort of that tool shed or storage unit, or they've got all their lawn equipment over there. And, and they forget that those things are equally as important to document and inventory, um, just for day-to-day knowledge and use over where did I put this stuff. Um, to the insurance and/or maintenance aspect of those things.

And I'm also a firm believer in if you are documenting everything that you own in all your units, and especially storage units, then you will have a way of communicating to your heirs once you've moved on. And Storage Wars is not bidding on your unit because you've documented it and you've explained to your next generation that here's where all the information is, go get it.

Correct. Yeah.

And that's the other thing, when you inventory it, tell, um, the people where the location of the storage unit is, the address, the location, the number, etc.

Without a doubt. I think we've done a previous episode about estate planning and absolutely Documenting the stuff that's in your storage unit as part of your estate plan is a huge, huge, huge reason why you want to inventory those things of A, what's not— what's actually in there, whether it's financial value or sentimental value.

Mm-hmm.

And B, where is it located? And C, how do you want to distribute it, you know, as part of your overall estate? Huge, huge, huge issues as it relates to that. Candidly, it just sort of dawned on me is that maybe some of these Storage War use cases is actually twofold. One is somebody's passed on and they haven't told anybody about it.

Totally.

Eventually somebody has to sort of auction it off. The other may be somebody's passed on and whoever their executor of their trust is, they're responsible for it. And they go look at the storage unit and they're like, I don't wanna keep any of this stuff. I just wanna auction it off kind of mentality, right? if they knew what was already in it versus completely auctioning it off, maybe they would be like, oh, buried in box 12 is that sentimental paperwork of when my parents came to Ellis Island. And that's really sentimental value kind of mentality.

Yes.

Because again, it's that what I call, if you walked into a storage unit that you've never seen before that came from a family member and you opened it up and you saw all the boxes, Stacked up this, that, and the other, you might be scratching yourself and going, do I really want to go through every single one of these? Some humans are going to want to do it. Other humans are going to be like, yeah, no, they were, they were a packrat and they stored a bunch of stuff and I don't care and I just want to sell it all. But again, but because they didn't know what was already in those boxes, they may be selling stuff that's either a financial value or sentimental value, but they just didn't want to take the effort to kind of go through it all.

Correct. No, agreed. I mean, this is— we, we've shared a lot about storage units. We've shared a lot about why you want to do this, and then also shared about other structures, because we often forget how many structures we have. And, and it's easy to be on the inside of your house, as we've discussed, and forget about all the other things exterior from the house, whether it's on the same property or whether it's Outside of that property. And taking a home inventory can really benefit not only the next generation, but yourself to know what you have. And when you're ready to purge or not ready to purge, you can take the action to do that.

Yep. Maybe I'll put you on the spot. I'll ask you a question, Elizabeth. Twofold question. What would you tell someone to recommend someone who already has a storage unit? but didn't inventory it, what advice would you give them about how to go about doing that? And then the second one is, what about the person who hasn't bought a storage unit yet, but they're thinking about it? So are they different or are they the same kind of mentality?

Kind of the same, but kind of different. So the one who hasn't documented, who hasn't took on a storage unit yet, it's easy for them to get started. Tell them start taking photographs and start taking pictures and details of what you have in that storage unit, and find a way to get that inventory going. That's what I would do. That's the first thing because it's easy, and I would do it piecemeal by piecemeal. You may not move everything into the storage unit all at once. You may be moving things here and there, and then that's an easy process. But you've got to remember to do it ongoing, and that's the thing that a lot of people forget about even in their houses. They forget to keep taking inventory of the net new items that they bring in their house. You know, so like you get a great new espresso machine. Did you take a picture of it? Did you put it in your system? Right? I think I forgot to do that, and I gotta go do that this weekend. Just FYI, I have this cute little new espresso machine I want to play with. Um, but the the person that's already got already has such poor English who already has a storage unit. That has stuff in it, I would do my best to try to take an overall picture of the space because you may be able to see large items. And then if I had the opportunity, I would take just a little bit of effort and open the boxes, if there are things in boxes, and take photographs as best I can. Now, some of that stuff may be wrapped and you don't wanna unwrap it, but find a way to recall what you put in the boxes and then start entering that information.

Yeah.

And I know it sounds meticulous and I know it sounds challenging, but whatever reason you have a storage unit, if you need that information in the storage unit, those items in the storage unit, when you come back from living somewhere else, the likelihood of you buying the same thing twice is less because you know what's in it. I mean, let's face it. If you already bought a great little espresso machine, like I'm on this espresso machine, then there's no need for you to buy another one when you have a new house, and because you're just going to get double duty, and so you're going to be frustrated with yourself that you bought the same thing, and it's just one thing after another. It's just a waste of money. So I would recommend that you do your best to uncover some of the boxes now. If you can't actually get into the storage unit because it's so packed full, then you have to use recall memory, which is a very challenging situation because you are going to be frustrated about what you can remember and what you can't. And then when you're ready to remove everything from that storage unit, then you can start fresh with an inventory. Or here is another option. There is another great option. You can hire somebody to do it.

Yeah.

There's inventory professionals, there's professional organizers that do inventory services. They're all over the country. Many of them actually use HomeZada to, to document a lot of this stuff because they see that HomeZada is super easy to do this. And so they can do it for you. And maybe that is where you don't worry about your frustration. And you have someone else document it. And then by documenting it, the inventory professional of sorts, they can give you an example of what do you want to keep? What don't you want to keep? Where do you want it to go? Do you want it to automatically go to another family member now? Where do we need to ship it? Where do we need to drop it off, etc., etc.? And all of a sudden, you've let go of the pain of trying to recall what's in there, and you spent a little bit of money. hiring somebody else who can get this done for you as quickly as possible. And you don't have to be a member of Storage Wars.

Or you could have a little storage party on some weekend where you bring yourself and a few family members, just say, okay, we're going to spend 2 hours, pull everything out, open the boxes, take pictures and put it back.

Oh my gosh, you're so funny. This is like moving. Family members don't want to help you move either. So I don't know that that's going to be the best solution. But It could be fun, but—

Yes.

Yeah, it could be a fun ideal, but I don't see it happening.

I think it's maybe there's a dynamic over what I call the shifting of the pain. Meaning for people who have storage units who haven't taken one, maybe there's that mental pain of, do I really wanna go in and take all that picture? So there's that upfront thing and then they kind of like drop off. But then think about the pain of every time they go to the storage unit and they don't know what's there or not. They're having to spend more time at the storage unit trying to locate that stuff. And if they, if they're constantly going back and forth, it's like every single time they go to the storage unit, they're spending an hour trying to find what their need is. And they're doing that, you know, 12 times a year. They've just spent 12 hours versus if they had just taken those 2, 3 hours up front.

Totally.

Document everything, create a better organizational strategy around that, taking pictures. Then every time they're there, they're in and out and they're off doing the fun things that they want to do in life.

Yes, totally. And then, like I said, if eventually you want to get rid of that storage unit, you can do that too by eventually giving everything away.

Yep.

Yeah. So I think we've covered a lot about storage units and why it's important to inventory the items in it and the value of it, how it can save people time. It's definitely saved them money because they may not buy the same thing over and over again. Because that's the risk they will. And then they can also make sure that the next generation has access to it.

Yep.

You know, when it's time to go. So I think this is great.

Yeah, my summary is the biggest value is once you, once you do it, then you instantly have access to know what's exactly in there at any point in time. Maybe you're traveling on a vacation and you're coming home and you're like, oh, I need to stop by the storage unit to pick something up. Is it there or not? Or is it at the house? Boom, you're at the airport checking out kind of in So, so many different value points of being able to see that.

Oh yeah, totally. And so any other last thoughts?

No, I think I'm, I'm all good.

Oh, fantastic. So we covered storage units. I'm so excited because so many of our customers engage in that process using HomeZada. So we want to thank you so much for listening to us at Be a Smarter Home on our podcast. If you like this, please share it if you think anyone needs to see this. To avoid Storage Wars, I know it's a fun show, but to avoid it, please share this with them. And then for those of you who want to learn more about who we are, HomeZada, as well as Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, please visit us at www.homezada.com. That's H-O-M-E-Z-A-D-A.com. And we hope to see you at another Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. Have a wonderful day.

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