The Marriage of Portable Storage and Moving

It seems that storage and moving go together. Every time I have moved, I needed to store things at some point during the process. When I was in college, my parents had a storage unit and I ended up ditching lots of things there every time I moved. Every summer vacation, I would bring more things home and stash the things I did not know what to do with in there. I never really seemed to take anything out of there, though. I hired professional movers when I moved to the East Coast to go to grad school, and I scheduled a pick up there for those items I assumed I surely could not live without. Not surprisingly, I did not have the movers take more than an old chair and my skiing gear. That little storage and moving debacle hurt my wallet a bit, as I had to pay them for the two extra hours it took for me to look through all that stuff. I was young; what did I know?
When my husband (then boyfriend) and I first decided to move in together, we had another storage and moving voyage. He thought it would be easiest to put almost all his stuff in storage, since my apartment was the size of a postage stamp and I was already settled in. We rented a big house with another couple a year later and he was able to unload everything from storage and move it into the house. We kept the storage unit and used it for the overflow that occurs when you share a house with a bunch of people. We had a few friends here and there that would stay in our guest bedroom for months at a time. They all used our storage place. When we moved out of the group house, we had a huge yard sale and put a lot of stuff on the curb. We then finally ended our contact with the storage facility.
We were storage unit free, until we decided to remodel our house. We had always leased one of those storage places that was just a storage building, whenever we did our storage and moving dance. We had to get the stuff to and from the storage warehouse ourselves. This time, we decided to go with one of those transportable self storage services. We do not remember such a thing even being an option in all our past moves. They brought the steel storage box to our curb and we moved items into it at our leisure for ten days. When we were done packing it up, the storage and moving company picked the thing up and moved it to their storage warehouse. After so many experiences moving things into storage via the old school method, this was like a walk in the park. We had a key to access our container in the climate controlled and guarded facility, just like we did at our old storage unit. When the construction had been completed, we had the company bring the metal storage box back. We kept it for a week, while we unpacked. We will never go back to our old storage and moving ways. It is nice to know we are much smarter than we used to be.