El Cajon Self Storage Topics

Gardening Equipment Storage - El Cajon Self Storage

Keeping My Lawn Care Business Supplies in Storage

Running a lawn care business in El Cajon has been one of the most fulfilling things for me. I love making other people's lawns beautiful, and I love the smiles I see on their faces when I finish taking a jungle and turning it into a gorgeous lawn. I even do some landscape design now, which is also great!

When I first started this business a couple of years ago, I was able to run everything out of my home office and keep all the supplies and equipment I needed in my garage. Since I was only doing a handful of lawns at a time, I didn't need that much by way of supplies and equipment, so my wife and I made do with using our garage for the business.

Now, though, I have a lot more going on. I've actually had to hire a couple of employees to help me run my business. Since I have employees who require their own equipment to use during jobs, I obviously have way more by way of business supplies now than I did a few years ago. That's why I use an El Cajon Self Storage unit at a location called US Storage Centers for storing my lawn and garden equipment for my business.

How I Came Across It

When I was researching options as my business expanded, I was originally thinking I would probably have to rent out a larger office space with a warehouse attached. That was so expensive, though! It was definitely out of my budget if I wanted to continue turning a profit, which I obviously did! So I looked into what other lawn and garden care businesses do, and I found that many actually use self storage units for their equipment and supplies.

It seemed like a good idea to me at the time, so I decided to check out local El Cajon Self Storage locations. That's when I found US Storage Centers El Cajon Self Storage. It definitely stood out when compared to the rest of the self storage locations in town, and I chose it for a few reasons. Here are just a few of the reasons I chose US Storage Centers over other El Cajon Self Storage locations.

Knowledgeable

One thing that I liked about the US Storage Centers El Cajon Self Storage location was that the manager was knowledgeable about his own business. He works with other business owners in the area who rent storage units there, and I can see why many of them choose to rent there. As soon as I explained what I was looking for and what I needed, the manager of the US Storage Centers El Cajon Self Storage location laid out my options with different units.

It was great because he was able to give me the pros and cons of renting different unit sizes, and he even helped me find the best particular unit on the property for my needs. Just the fact that he knew how to help a customer find the solution for their needs and the fact that he took time to show me my different self storage options were enough to make me want to rent there!

Records Storage - El Cajon Self Storage

Storing My Home Business's Files

Running a home business mostly online would, you'd think, not require much space. At least, that's what I thought when I first toyed with the idea of starting an internet company in my home. But after talking with a few other internet entrepreneurs, I found that they all seemed to struggle with finding enough space. It wasn't because they had a lot of products to store or even an employee to find desk space for. It was because they had to keep so much paperwork, which took up more room than they were willing to sacrifice in their home offices.

Since I wouldn't really even have an office for the business I would run out of my one bedroom home – unless you count the kitchen table as an office space! – I was really concerned about having enough space to store my business's files when I started my home business. So I started checking into solutions before I even started the business.

That's when I came across the El Cajon Self Storage location called US Storage Centers. After talking with the manager of the El Cajon Self Storage location, I found that, actually, lots of small business owners use a self storage location like US Storage Centers to keep their business files in. Apparently, most small business owners don't actually have room for their own business files!

Well, that made me feel better about my situation, and I decided to go ahead and rent a closet-sized unit with the US Storage Centers El Cajon Self Storage location before I even really got my business up and running. After all, the getting the business started phase would come with a bunch of paperwork of its own!

How I Organized Everything in My El Cajon Self Storage Unit

Being a bit of a cheapskate, I decided not to get file cabinets until I could find them on Craigslist for cheap. Luckily, file cabinets pop up on that site all the time! It seems like businesses are always going out or homeowners are always trying to downsize things like that! It was really easy to find a couple of two-drawer file cabinets that I could easily stack in my El Cajon Self Storage unit so that I would have room for the paperwork I'd need to store at the start of my business.

I immediately designated one drawer for paperwork I would keep forever – such as the paperwork from when I turned my business into a limited liability company. Another drawer was designated to hold paperwork that I would use in filing that year's taxes, and the last two drawers were for rotating paperwork. One would be for client paperwork that I could get rid of on an annual basis, and the other would be for tax paperwork that I would need to keep for several years.

Storing Furniture at El Cajon Self Storage

Storing My Furniture to Sell

A few months ago, I decided that I wanted to buy new furniture. That's not a new thing for me, since I normally buy furniture about once every three or four years. I get the good stuff, too, so it's not cheap, and it's still in excellent shape when I'm ready to sell it. The problem, sometimes, is simply finding a buyer for my furniture. It can take time to find someone who wants to buy the furniture for what I want to sell it for, although I always end up getting a decent amount of money out of my used furniture eventually.

The problem is that I'm often ready to buy new furniture before I sell the old stuff. Two sets of furniture would obviously leave my home rather cramped for a time. That's why I used an El Cajon Self Storage unit at a place called US Storage Centers to store the old furniture until I find a buyer for it.

I've used this strategy twice now when selling old furniture, and it works rather well. I'm an old pro at putting my old furniture safely into an El Cajon Self Storage unit, and I know how to pack it so that it can be looked at easily by potential buyers. Here are the top storage tips I use for keeping my furniture safe and tidy in my El Cajon Self Storage unit:

1. Leave some room: It would probably seem more cost-effective to pack the furniture right next to each other so I could rent a smaller El Cajon Self Storage unit, but I don't do this for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it makes it more difficult to get pieces in and out of storage, and for another it doesn't leave room for air flow between pieces, which keeps moisture from building up and keeps everything in great shape.

2. Pack on pallets: I pick up packing pallets from the grocery store dump once in a while, and I use them to keep furniture up off the floor. That helps keep it free from water damage if something leaks, if the concrete floor sweats, or if water happens to leak in under the door or something.

3. Cover with cloth: It seems like a good idea to cover furniture in storage in plastic, but this doesn't work very well because it invites moisture to build up. In the past, I covered a couch with plastic only to notice a gross smell when I unpacked it, and found that it was moldy because the furniture couldn't breathe. Now I use soft drop cloths to keep dust off the furniture and to keep wooden pieces from rubbing against things and getting chipped.

Storing Baby Stuff in El Cajon

Storing Our Baby's Off Season Clothes and Toys

When you have a baby, you don't really think about your baby having "off season" clothes like an adult does. Once they get into those bigger sizes, though, they stay in them longer, so they usually do have off season clothes. Plus, most babies have off season toys – beach toys and outdoor toys for the summer, especially. One of the problems with having a very small apartment without a lot of extra room is that you really don't want all that off season stuff in your home when you don't need it at the time. When my husband and I discovered this fact, we decided that it would be a good idea to rent a small El Cajon Self Storage unit to store baby's off season clothes and toys.

We didn't think about renting an El Cajon Self Storage unit for our baby's stuff until he was in twelve month clothes and had an entire years' supply of clothes, including some seasonal items. Before this, we had been in the smaller sizes that he would only be in for a few months, so he had fewer things in these sizes. The twelve month clothes were simply too numerous to fit in his dresser, and there was literally nowhere for us to put a couple of boxes of off season clothes in our apartment.

We needed a solution, and we needed it fast because the extra clutter was driving me nuts. That's when we decided to check out El Cajon Self Storage units in the area. We finally came across US Storage Centers El Cajon Self Storage location, and we were able to check it out and rent a small unit for our son's off season clothes and toys.

We chose this El Cajon Self Storage unit for a few reasons. For one thing, we decided that we needed to store these items somewhere close to home. You never know when off season is going to become in season, and you'll have to switch out the clothes in a heartbeat or risk sending your child off to daycare in inappropriate clothing. The El Cajon Self Storage unit was within a few minutes' drive of our home, so it would be easy to access.

The fact that the US Storage Centers El Cajon Self Storage unit was secure and clean was also important to us. However, the thing that really sold us on the US Storage Centers El Cajon Self Storage center was the pricing. It offered competitive prices on small storage units, and we were able to easily fit the cost of storage into our monthly budget.

Sports & Storage - El Cajon

Keeping My Team's Paintball Gear

For my friends and I, team paintballing is what we do most of the time when we aren't working. We actually have a practice field outside of town, and we spend tons of time – and probably, in the opinions of some people, way too much money – on paintballing. What can I say? It's really just fun and addicting! Between all of us, though, we have quite a bit of paintball gear, and it's hard to find a place for everything in our own homes. Because of this, we rely on an El Cajon Self Storage location called US Storage Centers to help us keep our paintball gear where it's accessible without being in the way in our own homes.

We came across the idea of the El Cajon Self Storage unit from another paintball team from a nearby town. Because they were all having trouble finding space for their paintball gear – both individual and shared – in their apartments and homes, they decided to go in together to store their gear in a storage unit. The idea was really appealing because we were just then starting to get serious about playing weekend-long scenario games, which required even more gear like camping stuff, cooking stuff, and coolers – besides all our regular camo outfits, paintball guns, masks, and paintballs.

So, we started looking for storage close to home, and we found US Storage Centers El Cajon Self Storage location. The El Cajon Self Storage location was ideal for us for a few reasons. For one thing, it was centrally located to most of our homes, which made it easy to get into the storage unit whenever we needed to. After all, some of us still practice or play paintball even when we aren't doing things as a team, so it was important that we all have equal, easy access to the shared storage unit.

Access was another important part of our decision in favor of the El Cajon Self Storage unit. The gate hours left us plenty of time to get into our storage unit whenever we needed to. Plus, we could easily all share the storage unit's code, which meant we could easily get into the unit individually whenever we needed to. Plus, we could put whatever type of lock we wanted to on the unit; we decided to use a combination lock. That way, we could each have the combination, and no one would have to worry about not having a key when he needed to get into the paintball gear in the storage unit.