The first storage locker I ever bought was $500. It was at a Uhaul storage facility in Blaine MN about 2.5 hours away from where I live in Duluth MN. I went there with my 8x10 trailer and my Yukon. I hired a kid named Billy to help me, I had no idea if we would even win any units. I was ready to get in bidding wars like I had seen on the Storage Wars shows but that's not how it went down. At Uhaul like many of the other storage facilities to avoid fights and conflict, they dont hold the auctions like they do on TV. You go around and look at each unit with all the other interested people and then go into a room and they go unit by unit and you write a number down on a piece of paper, hand it in and the person with the highest number wins. (Silent auction) It was not as exciting as I envisioned but in the end it turned out for the best. I was able to buy a unit for $501 and another one for $101. I had an issue on my hands, there was more stuff in the 2 locker than I was going to be able to fit on my trailer. I have a full time job and took this day off but had to work the next day, what do I do? I came up with the plan that I was going to sort through and take a load to a local landfill and then come back and take the rest of my booty home and be rich! We started going through the first unit which had a bunch of cool stuff in it, what we saw from the preview was an expensive looking dining room set, a lawnmower, a bunch of totes and then everything else was covered with a tarp. We dig in and begin to explore, it seems like every unit I have ever bought actually tells a story about the person that for whatever reason could not pay to keep renting it. In this case the owner of the locker was in jail. We found a bunch of court records and paperwork from before he was sentenced and it looked like this rich guy managed to drive drunk and kill someone with his Corvette. I didn't feel so bad that I now owned all of the property he thought was valuable enough to pay to store it. 60% of what was in the locker was paperwork from a trucking business and stuff that was destine for the landfill. I called a few local dumps and finally found one that I thought we could get to in time so that I could come back and load up the good stuff and go home. It was hard trying to just load all the crap onto the trailer because we really wanted to go through the good stuff, so it took a little longer than expected PLUS we hadn't even looked at the 2nd unit yet. We finally got all of the garbage onto the trailer and headed for the dump, it was 3pm and the dump closed at 4 PLENTY of time right? My GPS takes me to the address that I thought was the dump and I get there at about 3:30 and we look at each other and are like "Where the F is the dump?!" As my luck would have it the address that I went to was the business office for the dump and not where you actually take the garbage. I call the phone number and they give me the new address, its about 20 min away. I slam on the gas, weave my way through Minneapolis traffic, call the actual dump site and beg them to stay open and I get there at about 4:05 and thank goodness they let me get rid of this crap. We finish unloading the crap and make our way back to Uhaul. We started the day at 6am and its allready almost 5pm and we haven't even really looked at what we went there for. We get back and start going through and loading the trailer up with our goodies. Among the treasure was a Ashley Furniture Dining room set valued at $2500, an 1800's wagon wheel valued at $600 a tanning bed valued at $2000 a bunch of various antiques and high end home decor, a very funny apron, and then the cream of the crop. A Selva brand Italian sideboard piece of furniture. I took a picture and sent it to my wife to research because all of the sites I saw on my phone didn't list a price, this was a good sign I knew. Finally my wife txts me back and lets me know that brand new this thing was $6000, SCORE! We manage to get through everything in the first unit and its 8pm. We are super tired but we still have another unit, luckily the secind unit was a small one. This unit looked like someone had to pack up their apartment in a hurry and put it into storage, I mean it had dishes that looked like they were just taken right out of the sink and thrown into a garbage bag and everything was just tossed in there, pretty gross! The reason I bought the unit was because I saw an expensive bicycle in there and you couldn't really tell there was a bunch of nasty crap. Among the other decent stuff in there was another dining room table and chairs and about 200 DVD's the rest was all worthless crap. We had to load all of this useless crap anyway because it was getting close to 9pm and we wanted to get home. Now we have all of the goods from both units loaded onto the trailer and packed in the truck, with the 2.5 hour drive we get back to Duluth MN at about 11:30pm, what a day!
Now I am going to get rich from these treasures right? Not exactly, I learned very fast that something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. After about 8 months I was able to get $500 minus consignment fees for the Ashley Dining set, the Wagon Wheel sold for $200 at a friends estate sale, the bicycle and DVD's sold quick for about $300, the tanning bed sat in my basement for 2 years until I had to move and finally was able to find someone that would take it for free and the biggest treasure of all the super expensive Italian sideboard - I moved that thing from consignment shop to consignment shop (and its heavy AF) finally I put it in an online auction and wasn't paying attention and it sold for a whopping $14.00 All in all it was a very cool experience, I probably made about $2000 on that trip (there was a bunch of stuff that I didn't list in the story) and it led to me eventually starting my own junk removal business. These pics are also pre weight loss journey =)
Upvote, comment share and follow me if you like!! Lets support eachother!
![IMG_0206.JPG]
(
)
