At the February meeting of NAPO Houston, we watched a documentary called Store. It’s about self-storage units and how people use them. The filmmakers interviewed dozens of renters about their stuff and why they pay to keep it in storage. The interviewees offered all the common reasons: they moved to a smaller house, inherited stuff from a parent, or just accumulated too much to keep at home. But there were some less common reasons, too.

Your rental payments, like the storage units that clutter our landscape, go on and on forever.

One retired man had been collecting items from garage and estate sales, and he believed that his children’s inheritance was somewhere in his “collection.” Some day they would open his unit, pull out the junk, and find the treasures they’d inherited. Burglars had broken into the unit once, only to walk away empty-handed because the unit was too stuffed full of junk to bother robbing.

Another interview subject, a divorced mother, was storing a huge collection of stuffed animals. She said that she couldn’t throw away “anything with eyes.” …[Read more]