Moving into storage between homes
It is a common situation and it usually arrives late. A sale closes on a date the purchase cannot match, a build runs over, a lease ends before the new place is ready, or a relocation starts before the housing is sorted.
The gap is not the difficult part. What makes this expensive or cheap, and easy or miserable, is that it is two moves rather than one, and almost everything worth doing is decided at the loading end.
It is two jobs, so plan it as two
A storage gap means a load out of the old house into storage, then a load out of storage into the new one, usually weeks apart. Both need a crew, both need a truck, and the second one needs the first to have been done thoughtfully.
Book both if you can, even when the second date is provisional. It is much easier to move a booked date than to find one at short notice, and the second move often lands in the same contested part of the month as the first.
Load it for the way you will unload it
This is the whole article in one idea. A container or unit packed as densely as possible is cheapest to store and worst to live with. If anything has to come out early, and something always does, you end up unloading half the unit onto a parking lot to reach it.
So decide before loading whether you need access during the gap. If you do, load with a path down the middle and put the things you are most likely to want at the front: seasonal clothing, tools, documents, anything a child or a job needs.
Label with the destination room as usual, but add a second label on anything you might want during the gap so it can be found without opening six boxes.
- Decide up front whether you need access during the gap
- Load a walkway if you do, and accept that it costs space
- Put likely-needed items at the front rather than wherever they fit
- Keep an inventory list, even a rough one on your phone
- Photograph the loaded unit before it is closed
- Keep documents, medication, valuables and anything irreplaceable out of storage entirely
What storage does to belongings, and what to do about it
Central Iowa gives storage a wide temperature range across a year and enough humidity in summer to matter. That is fine for most furniture and awful for a few specific things.
Upholstery and mattresses want to be off the floor and covered with something that breathes rather than sealed in plastic, which traps moisture against the fabric. Wooden furniture and instruments do not enjoy large swings in temperature and humidity, which is the argument for a climate-controlled unit if anything on the load is valuable or sentimental.
Electronics should be boxed properly rather than left loose. And nothing perishable, nothing flammable, and nothing alive goes in, which is the same list a crew would refuse to load anyway.
Sizing, and the cost of getting it wrong
Undersizing a unit forces exactly the dense packing that makes retrieval hard, and it sometimes forces a second unit somewhere else, which is worse than one larger unit in every respect.
Ask the mover to size it as part of the estimate rather than guessing from a website chart, because they are the ones who will see the load. The same applies to whether a container delivered to the driveway or a unit at a facility suits your gap better: that depends on the length of the gap, the access at both properties, and whether you need to get into it.
The dates, which are the part that actually goes wrong
Closings move. If the second date is not yet certain, say so when you book rather than presenting a date you are not confident in, because a crew that knows the date is provisional plans differently.
Two practical things. Find out how much notice the mover needs to change the retrieval date, and find out how the storage is billed if the gap runs longer than planned. Getting both answers at booking is much better than getting them during a week when your closing has already slipped.