Chairs + Storage fee = D'oh!

We have six wrought iron chairs on our patio. I picked them up at the thrift store for $100 a while ago and frankly, they have seen better days. Our patio is not the biggest patio, Ethan is not the neatest kid and our apartment is lacking in storage space, so our patio was usually pretty cluttered.

I decided a few weeks ago that we needed a storage space to store some of the patio chairs. Of course, we would also use it to store our camping gear, seasonal junk and anything else we felt like tossing in there, but mostly, it was for the chairs. I called the storage company a friend uses and found out that the smallest unit they have is $40 a month. Sold! I told the guy I would probably call him the next day to set up a time to get our unit.

And then...

Marty did the (simple) math.

Even here, you can see the junk.

I was considering spending $480 a year to store our $100 chairs. I justified it in my mind by tossing the camping and other crap in the unit - all stuff that we have easily stored in the apartment.

So... we cleaned off the patio. We got rid of a Rubbermaid storage cabinet that was really only housing a bird nest, four bikes that haven't been ridden since we moved here* and a bunch of miscellaneous junk that Ethan had piled up. We also cleaned out Alex and Ethan's closet (tossing a bunch of old computer parts and cases that Alex had been saving because he was too lazy to walk them to the dumpster and a few boxes from electronics that Ethan was saving for the same reason) and made room for our camping coolers we had stored on top of the cabinet.

I posted on Facebook, offering four of the chairs for sale. If they sell, I will use some of the money to buy (hopefully, secondhand) a small table or two for drinks and the rest will go in to savings. If they don't sell, that's okay, too.

It is amazing what room you can find to save $480!

*So the bikes. When we lived in Midland, we rode everywhere. Every. Where. Now, we live on a main highway, with no sidewalks and a speed limit of 55 that no one follows. Most of the town doesn't have sidewalks, or if they do, they are old and uneven. Not a bike friendly town, at all. We decided to get rid of the bikes, because by the time we live somewhere that we can ride again, we will replace the thrift store/yard sale bikes with new bikes, with shocks that my bones/joints can handle.