We were interested in helping you make the right choices for storage so we asked Len Lothian Self Storage, a leading self-storage company in Scotland, their advice and they helpfully produced this article from some of their focus groups.
A Personal Perspective - Mr and Mrs Smith
Scenario: Two years ago we decided to extend and refurbish our family home. We had to move out of the house for 7 months whilst the work took place and to make sure our furniture was kept safe and undamaged; we made the wise decision to take all of it out of our home.
More Space
We did a bit of research to begin with and found that most self storage companies based around the Edinburgh area offered storage spaces with a maximum height of 7 to 8 feet. In comparison, we used a company with room heights of 10 feet, offering us 20 – 30% more volume for similarly priced units of 150sqft.
Cost
We had a lot of furniture that we didn’t need whilst renting a flat, so it was all stored compactly in a secure self storage unit. To make the service as cost effective as possible, all of our furniture and goods were stored carefully and efficiently, utilising all of the useable space.
Renting a large flat to accommodate our three children and ourselves was going to be expensive, so we decided to rent a smaller flat which meant that we could not have everything we needed in the flat as it would become too cluttered and miserable to live in. To compensate for having a small flat, we rented another self storage unit with shelving. The cost of an additional self storage unit against renting a large flat made a great deal of sense to us cost wise.
Accessibility
Everything that we required over the 7 months but could not have in the flat was laid out neatly on the shelves within the unit. This was very useful for storing the children’s toys. With the children being 4, 6 and 8 years old, having all of their toys in the flat would have been difficult. As we had free access to come and go as we pleased during their extensive opening hours, we went down to our unit in Granton, Edinburgh each week. The kids had to store away the toys they didn’t want for the following week and were then able to pick which toys they wanted to take back to the flat. This arrangement worked particularly well for us and in fact – we still have the unit today!
Flexibility
We never really had to plan when we needed to go down to the unit because we chose a facility with 7 day a week opening! The flexibility was fantastic - we could just go down when we felt like it or when we needed something. Another advantage of the company we chose was the fact that we could just drive right into the facility, so when it was raining, windy and cold, we were protected and sheltered inside the building which was great during the winter months! We couldn’t find another facility in Edinburgh where we could do this. In all of the other sites cars had to be parked outside which would’ve made our visits much less pleasant.
Safe Self Storage
The flat that we rented was fully furnished and equipped with some really good furniture, ornaments and standard lamps. We were concerned about these items getting damaged, with our three young children running about, so we asked the rental company to remove them from the flat. We recommended that the items should be stored and suggested we add them into our existing storage units, which meant that we could relax whilst living in the property with the excess furniture safely stored away.
Satisfaction
Unexpectedly the building work on our house took longer than we had planned (when does that ever happen!). We explained this to our storage provider and the staff reminded us that we were only contracted on a day to day basis so we could keep the units for as long as we needed. Overall we were delighted with the service. The staff were very friendly and helpful, and the security was good with alarms and CCTV systems installed.
Len Lothian U-Store has self storage facilities in both Edinburgh and Glasgow.
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