The British climate isn’t such a bad one really. We have beautiful crisp spring mornings when the grass is new and green and the daffodils are in full bloom everywhere you look and cool misty autumn evenings when the leaves are piled high in a thousand different shades of yellow, brown and red. In between we’ve got warm (but not too warm) sunny summer days perfect for getting outside and enjoying ourselves. Even our winters aren’t too cold, with just enough snow to add a touch of excitement.
However, there is one downside to the British climate – the damp. It rains, it rains, it rains and just for good measure it rains some more. In most places humidity stays high throughout the winter and we’re served a steady diet of showers, drizzle, downpours, sleet, hail, and fog. More or less any way water can come out of the sky, we get it.
This constant dampness can cause problems when you’re putting things into long term storage or even just confining your summer clothes to the garage or basement shelving unit for a few months over the chilly season. Because nothing really dries out without being heated or properly aired, once something has gotten damp it stays damp.
You can avoid problems with damp and associated issues like mold and warping by arranging your storage containers carefully. First, don’t keep vulnerable items like papers and books in cardboard boxes. Use plastic, which keeps the damp out, and make sure everything going into the boxes is perfectly dry. If most of your storage is in cardboard boxes, put them up off the floor on a shelving unit- keeping boxes off the ground will go a long way towards stopping the contents from getting damp.
Our parents and grandparents always used to keep clothes and bedding (and almost anything else that went into long term storage) put away in boxes and on shelves all folded up with special chemical mothballs to keep pesky insects at bay. The expression ‘mothballed’ comes from this practice of carefully racking something away and not expecting to want it again for a long time. The mothballs did keep the moths away, but there was a downside. They made everything smell quite sharply and the balls themselves were toxic. That’s one reason you don’t see them around much any more.
Most moths are completely blameless and have no interest in eating fabrics at all. It’s only a couple of species out of hundreds that you need to watch out for, so there’s no need to worry if you see moths flitting around your outdoor lighting or even if they get into the garage that holds your storage units. The bothersome ones are usually very small, less than half an inch in length and about as slim as a pencil lead. Even then, there are many harmless species that fit the description.
Sometimes moths can be a problem but there is no usually need to resort to chemical means to keep these critters out of your belongings. Simply racking your goods in plastic boxes or wrapped in plastic bags will keep them safe from moths. Storage in plastic boxes or bags also keeps things clean and a little more tidy.
If you’ve got a lot of stuff stashed away in storage racking and shelving units you’re already halfway to being able to find everything you need quickly and easily. Piles of cardboard boxes are a nightmare to search through if you’re not sure which box the item you’re after is in. Anyone who has spent a long day moving house and then gone to the new kitchen for a well-earned cup of tea only to realise that the mugs could be at the bottom of any one of a dozen boxes will agree with that wholeheartedly.
Having an organisational system for your shelving space goes one step further than simply making things much tidier and more accessible. It can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. If you’ve got a lot of things in storage, you might want to keep fairly detailed records of what was put where. If not, just having an idea where you put the DIY tools and where you put the recipe books could be enough.
Either way, it’s good practice to label boxes and shelving units. It won’t take very long if you do it when you store the items in the first place and it could save you a lot of time and frustration in the long run. For most of us, just labelling boxes or individual storage space spaces ‘Fishing Gear’ or ‘Paints and Paint Brushes’ is a very good idea. It’ll help you find things and also make it easier for other people to put stuff back in the right places.