Well I finally managed to work up both the energy and the nerve to start dealing with my storage unit this week. I’ve had the unit for basically five and a half years now (since I moved home from Boston at the end of 2012), and realized that I really, really needed to get it somewhat organized. It is nice to have something else semi-checked off my 101+ goal list.

The organization was needed badly, because when the movers unpacked everything for me—they didn’t put in the unit correctly—all the boxes were more or less behind larger pieces of furniture (or mattresses) and were unreachable. See the above and below pictures.

So I spent a good solid two hours Thursday morning rearranging the unit (and my shoulders are still extremely sore from the lifting and carrying that I did). I had planned on only dealing with part of it Thursday, and then finishing it up on Friday—but realized that I couldn’t leave boxes in the middle of the mini hall in the storage unit (doing that would have probably resulted in either boxes being thrown out or stolen) and I wasn’t going to just cram them back in to the unit.

So during the two hours—I managed to get things reorganized. The mattress and box spring are against the side of the unit (instead of in the front). Then the bookcase was pushed back against the back (though I probably can still reorganize things to where the bookcase is totally against the back and boxes can be placed at least on the bottom shelf). Then I more or less have all the boxes in the front of the unit. I still need to get a lot of boxes so that I can spend another couple of hours (probably across several days) repacking things. I wasn’t that surprised when I saw how many boxes were falling apart or were caving in—all of the boxes had been acquired before moving out to Boston (so they’re all about eight years old), and if they’ve just started falling apart—its nice to know that they have about an eight year life span (though it could be a little less, since I wasn’t getting into it constantly).

Once boxes are repacked, there will be even a little more room for other boxes (and some furniture and/or bikes) from the house to also be placed within the unit.

It was nice to see that 1) I could actually stand within the unit and still have space for boxes, and 2) I have the small foot stool/ottoman down so that when I do need to repack things I have something to sit on. Yes, the kitty condo is leaning–but I think that is because there is a loose screw between the top house and the bottom portion.

So my next goal with the storage unit is to repack boxes, and also to maybe get rid of a few things that I probably don’t really need anymore. One thing I noticed was that I still have years worth of birding articles in the unit (since I do enjoy bird watching and reading bird articles; though I haven’t been saving the ones from the newspaper lately)—but unless I buy another photo album to make into a birding scrapbook—there really isn’t any point in saving the articles—they’d just wind up in the trash sooner or later. I have decided that I’m going to try and start limiting the amount of things I own and collect. Having collections are great, until you have to move them to the next place. While I know it will probably never happen—I’d like to get my belongings to a small enough number that if I just wanted to start traveling the country or world, it wouldn’t cost me a fortune in storage fees to house them somewhere.