I periodically go through my list and make note of things that I can purge.

I created this inventory the day I realised that I had no idea what was stored under one of my dinette booth benches, opened it up, and found it stuffed with plastic coat hangers! Out of sight is out of mind!

I did some work and put everything in a 30′ square space along one wall, and covered with tapestry. About 4 times a year I access to switch things around.

You bring up an excellent point, but let’s not overlook the benefits of having your stored items cataloged as pertains to insurance purposes.

Flood, fire, tornado, theft… being able to present your agent with a list of items you lost will go a long ways towards helping you in making an accurate claim and ensuring that you get your money’s worth out of your insurance policy. Ideally, such a system should go beyond permanent storage items and include many more household items.

In computer science we are taught to index data that is accessed frequently. There is a time cost associated with building an index and maintaining the index as stuff is added or removed.

If you often need to find things in your permanent storage, it takes you a long time to do so, and things are rarely added or removed, then building an index like this will save you a lot of time.

However it seems to me that stuff in permanent storage is, by its very nature, rarely needed. Suppose about one time per year you need something in your permanent storage that is hard to find. You have no index so it may take an entire hour digging through boxes to find it. This averages out to about 10 seconds per day of search related time.

On the other hand, you may spend the better part of a weekend organizing everything in permanent storage, building an excel sheet, taking digital photos, uploading them to your computer, linking the images to their appropriate storage container. Then you must also account for the time necessary to take a photo and update the excel sheet every time something is added, and the time to update the sheet every time something is removed. Now when you need something you can find it almost immediately with a quick trip to the computer, but I suspect that you have way more than 10 or 20 seconds per day of search related activity.

This method does have some merit, because I suspect it encourages people to keep less stuff in permanent storage. A more time efficient method would involve reducing the amount of stuff in permanent storage and organizing things often used together into the same box but not keeping an elaborate index. This way in the rare event that searching is necessary it is faster, but you do not spend as many total hours of your life dealing with the stuff in your basement.

I used to live in a NY suburb, and that may be one instance where paying for storage is worthwhile, because apartment space is so expensive. I lived in a tiny studio apartment, and I also had a storage unit where I stored things like out of season clothes, a few holiday supplies and mementos, etc. It was cheaper to do that than to live in a bigger apartment that had more storage space (my apartment was 180 square feet – I’ll bet a lot of people here have bigger closets than that!) But I knew that one day I’d live somewhere nicer, and I didn’t want to throw away family mementos and hand-me-downs that I’d want later on (and now I can finally use them!)

Kids stuff (first birthday cards, baby bonnet, etc) are in blue bins and each is stored on the top shelf in each child’s closet.

I use bins because they come in different colors, are airtight/waterproof, and last for ages.