How To Select A Temporary Storage For Your Belongings

Are you having difficulty selling your home? Temporary storage is a great way to de-clutter your home and make it more appealing to potential buyers. Home staging is currently a very popular way to prepare a home for the selling process, including open houses and showings. However, in order to properly stage your home you need to go through your belongings and perform a large scale de-clutter. This doesn’t mean you need to get rid of your belongings – you just need to get them out of the way until your home is sold. A self-storage space is a great place to put your belongings while you’re in the process of selling your home.

The benefit of using a temporary storage space when you are selling your house is that you don’t need to get tied down to a long-term contract, because you can’t predict how quickly or how long it will take to sell your home. Hopefully you will sell your home in a few weeks, but realistically it may take a few months or even longer, depending on the real estate market. While you’re waiting, your belongings can stay in a self-storage spot which you can rent for a long or short period of time. The flexibility here is a great advantage.

Another advantage to a self-storage space is that you can access your belongings whenever you need to. In the process of de-cluttering and staging your home you will end up having to move items out of your home that you may need to use occasionally. However, if you choose a self-storage location that is close to your home you can conveniently access your belongings when you need them. Let’s face it selling your home can be inconvenient. It’s hard to maintain a regular schedule because you don’t know when a viewing may take place and open houses can be a pain. Why add to your frustration by placing your belongings in a friend’s basement where you will feel like you are intruding every time you need to get something. With self-storage, you can access your belongings on your schedule, whenever you need to without the hassle.

Many people are surprised to discover that staging their home may require them to move a number of their belongings and pieces of furniture out of the way. However, this is an important part of the staging process. Staging your home is about creating illusions. You want your home to look bigger, brighter, cleaner and warmer so that it makes buyers want to buy it. In addition to de-cluttering, a professional stager may recommend that you move your own items out of the home so that they can bring in specially chosen items that will draw attention to certain features or help highlight the best parts of your home.

Stagers will bring in and use a number of items to help you sell your home, including: * Mirrors * Plants and silk flowers * Floor and table lamps * Area and throw rugs * Small love seats * Ottomans * Afghans and throw blankets * Pillows * Inflatable queen-size beds * Baskets * Large bowls of fruit * Colourful and fun cookbooks * Towels, tied with ribbons * Scented soaps * Creamy lotions It may seem frustrating to have to move your items out of your home only to have other items brought in for staging purposes, but professional stagers are experts at creating the perfect look for your home to make it more attractive to potential buyers. Temporary storage can be a great solution to help you survive the process of staging and selling your home.

Article Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=3539021

A Business Can Cut its Energy Use by Using Self Storage Units

Many businesses these days like to flag up their environmentally friendly credentials as part of demonstrating corporate social responsibility (CSR).

There are plenty of ways to make a business premises more environmentally friendly. They include recycling all re-usable waste, like paper and glass, using biodegradable packaging, having staff bring in cups or mugs for tea or coffee rather than using plastic throw-away cups, trying to cut down on paper use by not printing out unessential documents and by communicating as much as possible by email, remembering to switch off lights and computers when not in use and perhaps encouraging employees to car share.

But there is another way to cut down on energy use and reduce the carbon footprint that perhaps some businesses have not considered.

If you have a business that needs to keep paper records of customer and client information, which can be a legal requirement for organisations such as health authorities, residential homes, solicitors, will writers and accountants, the question is how and where are they being stored?

It is not always possible to convert all paper records to a digital version. It could eat up hours of staff time that might be better focused on the day’s business activity. It may also not be practical to do it for older, historic records that have a legal validity only in their original form or may not conform to modern standardised paper sizes.

However, it is worth considering how much floor space is being used within the business premises because it is additional space that has to be lit and perhaps also heated. As businesses are now required to record their energy and emission use it could cut the energy use by consolidating it all and storing it off site in a centralised self-store facility.

Business archiving is not the only thing that can be centrally stored to reduce the carbon footprint.

We know of an e-business in Ipswich, UK, that sells all its products online and keeps its stock in a self-store facility. Its owner says it means using less space, and therefore less energy, keeping its carbon footprint to a minimum.

Similarly, a children’s centre in the town has a vast collection of donated toys for both indoor and outdoor use. Keeping the surplus in a self-store facility means that outdoor play equipment can be protected in the winter, prolonging its useful life, and indoor play equipment can be rotated to allow for repairs and cleaning and also to ensure that there are regularly new ranges of toys to keep the children stimulated.

There are other advantages to centralising storage. It helps to declutter the office and it is possible to install shelving or racking for stock and equipment, or filing systems for archiving, in a self store unit to make it easy for the business to access anything it needs quickly.

Self-store facilities themselves contribute to energy efficiency because most of them have heat or motion-sensitive lighting indoors and for outdoor security.

Using a centraliserd self-store unit can therefore give a business not only environmental but financial benefits.

Article Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=3419322