Rainy days and ample coffee shops make Portland the ideal place to curl up with a good book for a month or six. If you’re a bibliophile who looks forward to great studying weather, then college in a place where everyone’s just as well-read as you are makes perfect sense. Whatever school you choose, your living situation, interests and academic pursuits are likely to fluctuate during your college years. Believe it or not, the stresses of all of these scenarios can be eased through storage. Don’t worry if you’ve never rented a unit before and aren’t sure what you need to know. We’re here to give you a free lesson in storage. We promise there won’t even be a test at the end.
Storage Near Your School
As a college student, you don’t necessarily have a car. While that’s practically a disaster in some other west coast cities (ahem, Los Angeles), in Portland it’s totally cool. So cool in fact that you might never need a car. The city is very into going green, which makes biking, walking and public transportation all excellent options. You can search
105 facilities in Portland through StorageFront. Most people tend to look for space within a mile or two of where they live, but if you’re on a budget, don’t be afraid to expand your search radius and include areas that are accessible by public transportation. Many facilities offer
truck rental, so even if you need to make a few trips to and from your storage unit that require you to haul loads that aren’t bus friendly, you can still store wherever you like.
If you want to keep things as close to your school as possible (hooray for walking), try
Central Self Storage if you’re studying at
Portland State University. They offer 24 hour cameras, boxes and supplies and online bill pay. If you’re studying at
Lewis and Clark College, you’re going to have a little bit of a harder time finding storage that’s walking distance from your school, but you can still find storage at a place like
West Coast Storage, which is just five miles away. They offer indoor, heated units along with a wide range of size options and flexible leases. The same goes for if you’re studying at
Reed College. Central Self Storage and West Coast Storage are both good options for you, the former being five miles away and the latter being eight. If you’re studying at the
University of Portland, storing at
SafeGard Mini Storage just two miles away is perfect for you. They offer drive up access (that means no carrying heavy items a long distance to and from your car) and competitive prices. SafeGard Mini Storage is also just two miles from
Concordia University .
Bookworms, Rain and Storage
Whether you’ve got a seriously epic Shakespeare collection or just the standard textbooks, you’ve probably never been schooled in how to properly store books. Let us be the first. In a rainy climate like Portland, it’s important to
pack and store your books in a way that preserves them. This is especially important if you’re going to be gone all summer and won’t be visiting your storage unit until fall. The best thing you can do to safeguard your personal reading collection and all of those ridiculously overpriced textbooks is to choose a facility that offers climate control. Thankfully, you’ll notice that many facilities in Portland (much more so than other cities) offer indoor, heated units. If you’re storing in an outside unit, or even if you have a climate-controlled unit and you’re feeling super cautious, take care of those books by packing them in boxes that won't absorb moisture. Instead of using cardboard boxes, use plastic totes. And make sure that you never place books directly on the ground of your storage. This will leave them vulnerable to damage from flooding which isn’t exclusively caused by rainfall. In fact, several facility managers that we spoke with told us that they see more flooding as a result of items improperly stored in neighboring units (like a fridge that hasn’t been defrosted prior to storage). If this happens to your stuff, your facility manager will call you. Keep books and other important items off the ground of your storage unit and if in the rare case that you do receive that phone call, it won’t ruin your day.
