11 April 09 - Spring Cleaning Your Home Could Lengthen Your Life
With summer just around the corner it’s a popular time to spring clean, but is there more to it than a vacuum cleaner and an old duster?
Getting rid of excess clutter actually eliminates 40% of the housework in the average home, and according to The National Association of Professional Organizers, we waste a year of our lives looking for lost items.
Andy Patrick, Managing Director of Quickstore, one of the first self storage companies in the UK, and now the major space provider in Devon, appreciates that there are significant physical and emotional benefits to having a spring-clean; “Most people look at de-cluttering, cleaning and organising as a chore. But I see the benefit to people’s lives every day. It's important to realise that our home and the way we live in it plays a huge role in our life. If we're living in a dirty, cluttered environment, we're going to feel bogged down, out of control, and perhaps depressed. However, if we're living in a clean, well-organised space; we're going to feel uplifted, empowered, and confident.”
According to practitioners of Feng Shui, an ancient Chinese philosophy of arranging objects around us in order to maximise positive energy, our home represents who we are at our deepest level. So to use the start of the year to de-clutter means we show ourselves and others that we're starting the year and moving through life in a positive, assertive direction.
A Spring Cleaning Survey, conducted by International Communications Research revealed that 98% of people asked felt better about themselves when their home is clean.
Whether you are de-cluttering, moving house; working from home or just need to re-gain some space, then self storage is a viable and reasonably priced option. Devon company Quickstore offers over 125,000 sq feet of secure storage divided into self contained units varying from 16 to 500 sq feet across their centres in Plymouth, Exeter and Torquay, and they have found that for many people the storage units are used as an extension of customer’s own homes.
Andy Patrick said; “The beauty of self-storage is that when people rent a unit with us they keep the key so that they come and go as they please, and now we are open on Sundays through the summer at our Torquay branch, access is even easier. Pressures on time and space make it difficult for many householders to keep on top of storage – many new homes don’t allow for storage at all. We often have things like leisure equipment – surfboards and bikes that customers may not be able to fit into their own homes. They can come and get it any time they like and with CCTV, a comprehensive NACOSS approved alarm system and a reporting fire alarm, it’s more secure than their garden shed – if they have one.”
And, of course, self-storage also attracts the more unusual customer. At Quickstore’s 4 branches across Devon the units have housed anything from film archives to a collection of church organs, the contents of a historical house and a colourful fancy dress inventory.