Storage vs bigger house - which is best

[itmar]

Hi,
I know I'm asking a vague question!

We are selling our house and moving to temporary accomodation in a new area (Oxford) while we house hunt. Does anyone know whether its better value to rent a small flat and store your goods or rent a slightly bigger unfurnished flat and cram everything into the spare bedroom?

I know it all depends on individual rental prices, amount of furniture etc but I'd be really interested to hear from anyone had a similar problem and what they decided to do. (DH has asked me to arrange for quotations for storage vs rental and I dont think I can bare to phone up all the removal companies/storage companies ask for endless quotes :) )

When we wanted to do something similar we had horrendous quotes from Big Yellow etc for the size we needed -especially as we knew things would be in storage for about a year. We decided to have a massive clearout and be ruthless -of books, toys, dvd's, furniture, crockery, clothes etc.We also really looked at our furniture etc and decided it wasn't really very valuable compared to what it was going to cost to store.

We managed to store a few things with relatives, put some things into auctions , furnished the smaller house and then just gave the rest away to charity shops, friends or on freecycle . We sold some valuable bits on gumtree and ebay until we ran out of time.

It felt really cathartic and gave us a good "new start". We also made a lot of other people happy. Now we are in our own (larger)house and the clutter is building again and we have had to re buy some book series etc but it was the right thing for us to do both economically and for our headspace at the time.

We had to move into a small rented flat last year and were shocked by the price of storage so did as enid did, had a very big clear out.

If you live in an area with the big companies (Big Yellow, Access etc) there are online calculators for costs so you don't need to ring round. A compromise might be renting a garage in a low-cost neighbourhood if you really can't clear out.