How Do You Know How Much Self Storage Space You'll Need?

Self-storage solutions can be an absolute lifesaver in a wide range of situations. Whether you suddenly need to downsize your home, or you just need a stop-gap solution while you move, these kinds of services can ease the burden of dealing with your stuff, until you have the time and energy to do so. 

While they’re undoubtedly useful, how do you go about working out how much space you’ll need? From making an initial inventory to measuring your larger bits and pieces of furniture, here’s how you can work it out.

Make an Inventory

To start the process off, it’s a good idea to make an inventory of everything that you think you’ll need to have stored. Try to be as precise as possible, including everything from books to old blankets and pillows. While this list of items won’t be easy to convert into a certain square meterage of storage space, it will provide you with a good starting point for the following steps.

Box Up What You Can

Once you’ve inventoried what needs to be stored, you will likely have to start boxing things up. It can be very difficult to look at a pile of stuff and know exactly how it’ll look when put into boxes - some items remain surprisingly bulky, while others might really squish down and disappear. 

Ultimately, you’ll need to know how those items look when they’re all packed up. Then, you’ll be able to make more precise calculations based on the dimensions of those boxes, allowing you to determine how much space you’ll need to store them all.

Measure Your Furniture

While boxes and other small items can be rearranged into different shapes, larger items such as furniture, pianos and sports equipment might be less malleable. If you’re renting a certain number of square meters from a storage provider such as Kiwi Storage, you’ll need to make sure that all of those larger items will actually fit into that space.

Measure the dimensions of those larger pieces, and compare them to the size of the container or room that you’ve got access to. It might take a bit of mental gymnastics, but with the help of a pen and a piece of paper, you should be able to arrange the items in a way that works.

Use an Online Storage Space Calculator

To supplement these methods, you can also try using a storage space calculator. These services let you put in a range of different variables, such as the number of beds, boxes and bikes you need to have stored, and will provide you with a reasonably precise answer to your storage needs. Of course, you’ll need to take the answers these calculators give you with a pinch of salt, but they can be really helpful in many cases.

By going through these relatively simple steps, you should be able to assess how much space you need for your self storage solution. Even when using the most accurate methods it can be difficult to come up with a fully accurate prediction, but you should be able to make an estimate that’s close enough for what you need.