Dale Wyngarden: We just can't help but want more
Aren’t you amazed at the proliferation of mini-storage complexes in our area? Who rents all these places, and what are they filled with?
We know there are many legitimate storage needs like temporary out-of-town military or work assignments, people in short-term medical care, the merging or dissolution of households, and changing family structures. We rented one for grandchildren switching off-campus college housing and needing one for summer storage. But these needs can’t account for all of the storage units peppering our community. I suspect that a good number of them are rented by people who simply have too much darned “stuff.”
We saw this when a friend faced downsizing from a spacious home and summer cottage to a three-bedroom condominium. Room for all the furniture was lacking, but so too was the will to part with any of it. The solution was to pack it into a storage unit to deal with later. As the years have passed and declining health leads this friend ever closer to assisted living, I suspect this storage unit is still bulging with stuff once held dear, but now all but forgotten.
It isn’t surprising that storage complexes hold periodic auctions to clear out units where rent payments have ceased and contents have simply been abandoned.
For some of us, the periodic garage sale is a way of purging our homes of too much stuff. It’s an acknowledgment that clothes or toys that have become outgrown, tools and appliances no longer used, or furnishing and decor no longer wanted, need to be cleared out. When we find ourselves overwhelmed by more “stuff” than we need or want, the solution is selling it, giving it away or throwing it out, but not packing it off to a storage unit. Bigger barns have never been a healthy way of coping with overabundance.
But that’s a lesson many of us apparently have yet to learn. The storage complexes keep popping up. Established ones expand. Middle-class prosperity coupled with a big boat or motor home is likely to produce an oversized steel barn in the backyard. A smaller boat or pop-up camper might be accommodated by a three-stall garage, defining the front facade of what would otherwise be an attractive home. We seem readily inclined to devote our treasures or sacrifice the aesthetics of our homes to storage needs for our “stuff.”
Too much “stuff” is really just a corollary of too much space. We have a penchant for living large. For many years, close friends out east lived in a townhouse with four bedrooms, three and a half baths, two kitchens, two family rooms, and a den, living room and formal dining room. That’s a lot of space for two people. When they downsized, it was to a condominium with three bedrooms, two and a half baths, living/dining room, sunroom and a monster of a family room. Still a lot of space for two people. Both residences were in large developments filled with middle-class Americans living the same good life.
Opulence fascinates us. We drive to Muskegon to marvel at the Hackley mansions built by lumber barons. On grander scales, we visit Biltmore, Versailles, Buckingham, Schonbrunn or the Heritage to walk through the palaces of royalty. We choose our homes much like we choose our cars.
They don’t reflect our basic needs so much as reflect our success. Nothing says we’ve made it better than more horsepower or more floor space than we’ll need or use.
Our abundance has been fed in part by living into an age of cheap energy. Central heating replaced fireplaces and space heating in part because coal was abundant and affordable. For a long time, so was natural gas. About the time we were exhausting our gas reserves, we discovered fracking, and are now back in a time of seemingly endless availability. Power plants long reliant on coal have switched to gas, and electricity is still relatively cheap.
This era will inevitably end. Much of Europe now pays two to four times what we do per kilowatt hour, and their housing and transportation reflect life with higher energy costs. But until our own gas resources begin to dwindle, go big or go home will still be our mantra. Future generations may judge us as profligate in our energy consumption, but for now we feel blessed to be living the good life in an era of abundance.
— Community Columnist Dale Wyngarden is a resident of the city of Holland. He can be reached at wyngarden@ameritech.net.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Dale Wyngarden: We just can't help but want more
