Roll on the sunshine – the big spring clean is just around the corner!
The sun is finally here (almost), coats are getting lighter and the flowers are poking their heads out from under autumnal leaves and wintery ice. With this change in the air and Spring around the corner, a fresh start and a new look is on everyone’s minds – whether that’s a new haircut, new job or more often than not, some redecorating.
With this comes the long-awaited seasonal ritual – the packing away of the winter coats, boots, and sports equipment that are spilling out of closets and piling up in various corners of the home. Spring is a great time to get rid of all of the stuff that has been accumulating around the house. For some this may be just cleaning out the closet to accommodate for a warmer wardrobe, for others it is a time to really get down and dirty eliminating clutter and cleaning the whole house from top to bottom. Whichever way you do your spring cleaning, a cost efficient way to organise the leftover clutter is a storage room.
With Big Yellow Self Storage you can easily store your valuables while de-cluttering, redecorating to moving. You can store things of all shapes and sizes, with room sizes from 9 sq ft up to 400 sq ft. We employ state of the art customer service and technology in all our stores, boasting 24 hour digital CCTV monitored by staff round the clock. Each self storage room is protected by its own alarm while there’s also unique PIN entry access, well lit corridors and fire detection systems in all self storage locations with easy access 7 days a week. Visit our Quote & Reserve Online page for details on how we can give you a helping hand.
Over the next few month’s we’ll be bringing you the best tips, tricks and online resources to help you make the most of the spring clean season. Hit the subscribe button above to keep in the loop.
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Did You Know: That nuts and bonnets don’t mix?
A woman in America was surprised to discover that her car’s indicator had stopped working because there were thousands of nuts stored under the bonnet of her car?
As reported in the Metro, Hope Wideup of Indiana came across the horde of walnuts when she opened the car’s bonnet to see what was wrong. ‘There were thousands in there. They were everywhere,’ she said.
Wideup suspects that it all started when a chipmunk snatched a garden glove from her yard. She later found the glove in the engine compartment when she was trying to repair the broken turn signal. Unable to fix the problem, however, Wideup let the car sit unused for a couple of weeks, before hearing an unusual noise from the engine when she finally tried to start the vehicle.
The moral of the story? Check under your bonnet regularly and make sure that one of your furry friends hasn’t taken up residence.
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The Sunday Times Best 100 Companies: We’re Moving Up!
It was this time last year that we won a Sunday Times 100 Best Companies To Work For accolade. Guess what? We’ve just won again, but this year we placed even higher! We’re now sitting pretty at number 25, up 43 spots from 68. Even though the economic downturn has created a knock on effect on the self storage industry, our company culture of involving our staff at all levels and rewarding them has contributed to better results and continued growth.
For those who don’t know, the Best Companies organisation was formed with the purpose of making the world a better workplace and has established its reputation through an authoritative and highly rigorous methodology. Each year its media partner, The Sunday Times, publishes the top 100 scoring companies. Their site inspections and workforce survey identifies workplace performance and best practice according to eight key factors. These factors are particularly significant as they are defined through survey results from employees – straight from the horse’s mouth if you like!
Leadership
How employees feel about the head of the organisation, senior managers, and the organisations values and principles
My Manager
How employees feel about and communicate with their direct manager
Personal Growth
What employees feel about training and their future prospects
Wellbeing
How employees feel about stress, pressure at work, and work life balance
My Team
Employees feelings towards their immediate colleagues and how well they work together
Giving Something Back
The extent to which employees feel their organisation has a positive impact on society
My Company
The level of engagement employees have for their job and organisation
Fair Deal
How happy employees are with their pay and benefits
To see how we ranked against the other 99 and what our staff members had to say visit The Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For online here.
Many thanks goes out to our Head of Human Resources, Cheryl Hathaway and our brilliant staff members – without whom this wouldn’t be possible.
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Tips and Tricks: Prepare your house for a sale
It really doesn’t take long to clean up your home when you’ve got an end goal in mind. If you are about to put your home on the market, then you should know that it becomes all the more important for you to make the space inviting. It’s a lot like presenting a blank canvas to a new family. Letting them see the potential for how they can make it their own – instead of getting distracted by what’s already there.
And when you are giving people the tour of your home, the last thing that you are going to want to do is make it look a lot smaller by failing to clear out any extra items.
Almost every home shows better with less furniture. Remove pieces of furniture that block or hamper paths and walkways and put them in storage. Since your bookcases are now empty, store them. Remove extra leaves from your dining room table to make the room appear larger. Leave just enough furniture in each room to showcase the room’s purpose and plenty of room to move around. You don’t want buyers scratching their heads and saying, “What is this room used for?”
What’s more, when you see those offers start coming in, you are going to thank yourself for taking the extra time to clean everything up.
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Lawrence Dallaglio swoops into Twickenham to store with us
As you will have seen on TV, the BBC’s Sport Relief campaign is well underway, and we here at Big Yellow Self Storage have been getting involved too by giving England rugby legend Lawrence Dallaglio and his friends a home for their bikes before their awe-inspiring 2,888km cycle ride across Europe to raise £1m for Sport Relief and the Dallaglio Foundation. We crammed 200+ bikes into our Twickenham store before Dallaglio and his team set off on their epic challenge which will see them cycling through all of the Six Nations countries, taking in each of the international rugby stadia along the way. The ride will end with team Dallaglio arriving in Murrayfield in time to watch England and Scotland fight it out for the Calcutta Cup on 13 March. See below for a picture of Lawrence at our Twickenham branch.
The aim is to raise £1m which will be split equally between Sport Relief and the Dallaglio Foundation, whose beneficiaries include Cancer Research, DebRA, Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, Help for Heroes and the RPA Benevolent Fund. Along the way, Lawrence will be joined by sports stars past and present, including Ashes heroes Andrew Flintoff and Michael Vaughan, Rugby World Cup winner Josh Lewsey and ex-England footballers Lee Dixon and Less Ferdinand. To keep track of the team’s progress and to make a donation click here.
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Tips and Tricks: Size is everything
Estimating how much space you will need for your storage items can be simple if you know what you want to store. First up, make a list of the items you want to store (this is also useful for helping to remember what’s in there, though it can often be fun to go back and have your very own treasure hunt!).
Next, group the items according to how you will organise them. Start by identifying items that will be packed in boxes and stacked, then prioritise boxed items you will want to access most frequently (they’ll go closer to the front of the room).
Divide by fragility or weight, as heavier, sturdier items should be stored on the bottom of stacked items with fragile items on top. Then consider awkwardly-sized items that won’t stack well, including how often you will need to use them, and how heavy they are.
Finally, take note of how these items will be packed and organised. Boxes and containers should be of uniform size, and should be stacked no more than a few boxes high (depending on the type of box you use).
You’ll then be able to estimate how much size you’ll take up, whether you want to keep some extra space for more items in the future – or simply pack things in and leave them till you move.
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Did You Know: That it’s impossible for bacteria to multiply on frozen food?
…making it safer than any other form of preservation? That’s why it’s an excellent way of storing everything from vegetables to meat and fish.
Foods today are ‘quick frozen’. This process, which freezes water in the food into smaller ice crystals, minimises cell structure damage. Quick-freezing foods and then storing them at temperatures of -18°C or lower slows the natural degradation process practically to zero. If you get this process right, food retains its colour, texture, nutritional value and taste.
You can’t store food or perishables in Big Yellow’s self storage facilities, but you can hire climate-controlled storage to keep your best wine at the perfect temperature!
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Tips & Tricks: Newspapers and Magazines
We’ve all had a special magazine or newspaper that we are tempted to keep for the future. It might be for reference or an historical event that we want to share with the future generations in the family. Sometimes these are valuable, but most often they won’t be worth much in monetary value. It’s the fact that “we were there” or how this event has touched our life that makes the edition important to us.
But how do you properly store those newspapers? Ask yourself some questions:
- Are these magazines and newspapers worth hanging on to, or can they be recycled to clear the clutter?
- Do you want to be able to go back and read the magazines and newspapers from time to time or are you happy to put them away and letting them sleep in a cool, dark place?
- Are your newspapers and magazines valuable or more sentimental?
- Do you want to keep them in pristine condition for 40 years or 400 years?
The biggest problem when storing paper keepsakes are pests! Here’s our top tips to ward them off:
1. Find a closet or drawer in a dry area.
2. Store and stack papers tight together, folded in half (as they are delivered).
3. Use a pest trap nearby, but not touching the papers.
4. Monitor your papers occasionally, checking for both pests and mold. Papers stored in this manner can stay in excellent condition for years.
Want more protection? Use the same basic methods as above, but purchase acid free folders to keep the papers in. Still store in that same dark, dry area and monitor for pests.
At Big Yellow Self Storage we offer clean pest free self storage, so you never need to worry about little nasties ruining your paper based keepsakes. Visit our “What is self storage page?” to find out how you can benefit from one of our self storage rooms.
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Did You Know: lager means storage in German?
The word “lager” is German and means “storage”, which refers to the lager (storage) fermentation process. The fermentation of both ales and lager is processed at a similar temperature for 7-14 days. After that time the ale, depending on the type, is ready for bottling. With lagers, this is only the start. After the main fermentation the beer is pumped into lager tanks with temperatures 10°C lower than room temperature. It is then left to mature and ferment for around 6-10 weeks to create the lager we all know and love! The longest lager fermentation process is for that of Budějovický Budvar brewery’s ‘Bud Super Strong’, the super-premium member of the Budvar family which takes 200 days to mature.
Energy efficient advancements have been made with the Cylindric-conical tanks (CCTs) used to store lager during the process of combined beer fermentation and maturation. The storage CCTs have evolved to ensure cooling and heating insulation can save up to 40% of energy consumed over previous years.
We don’t ferment lager here at Big Yellow Self Storage. However, we are extremely energy conscious throughout our operations. You can also use our self storage facilities to store anything you like for a little as a week, month, year or as long as you want. We only ask for seven days notice when you want to leave. Visit our Quote and reserve online page to get started.
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Donation Drive for Parcels4Troops!
Parcels4Troops organise small ‘home comfort’ parcels for soldiers to be sent out to them in the field. The scheme was set up a few years ago by ex-RCT (Royal Corps of Transport) Corporal Alasdair Sutherland to help a couple of his work colleagues who were in the Territorial Army and deployed in Iraq. The parcels were received extremely well and the word spread, resulting in many more parcels being sent out to the unit.
We’ve offered Parcels4Troops unlimited use of 100 square feet of self storage at our Edinburgh branch to help the donation drive. If you’re in the area, then donations from the following categories would be greatly appreciated:
Small packets of sweets (no chocolate or toffee – not very good in the heat)
Glucose sweets
Anti-bacterial hand gel
Packets of dried noodles
Cup-a-soups
Sachets of drinking chocolate
Chewing gum
Breakfast oat bars
Toothbrush and toothpaste
Moist wipes
If you’d like to get involved, you can drop off donations for troops during opening hours. Visit Big Yellow Edinburgh online for details. Alternatively contact Parcel4Troops via their website to find out how you can help.
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