What lies in store for your things

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Lisa Scott's not sure where she lies on the stuff continuum between gear glutton and bartering off-the-grid freegan. 

Last week I went to visit my stuff. "Hello stuff!'' I said. "Hello table! Hello chairs! Hello green clock covered in glitter and peacock feathers!''

The last time I saw any of my possessions, they were being wrapped and packed by a crew of men who tiptoed around while I paced like a tiger. Everything's been in storage since, but winter is coming and I want to be prepared: no longer the woman who cut her hand and foot every time she used the saw, the woman who used to scream when she saw a spider (OK, I still do that). I got snowed in for three days last winter without a warm jacket and nothing in the house but a heel of German rye and half a bottle of wine. Boy Scouts would have been disgusted.

Now, with a book on the way, there's an urgency to wood stacking, to fixing the grey-water pipe that floods the lawn, to lining the toilet. Every now and then I stop and chuckle at my stubborn certainty I would only be here for six months. It's been eight already and I've learnt that nothing is certain, but it will get cold.

Once a thriving international enterprise employing hundreds, the site of the old Roslyn Wool Mill is now a space given over to storing the possessions of the dispossessed. The reasons for putting your stuff in storage come down to the four Ds: death, divorce, downsizing and dislocation. People leave their cars, furniture and household goods there when they move somewhere smaller and can't bear to rid themselves of their treasures; when they go to jail; when they are in transit from one city/country to another; or if they remarry and duplicate a houseful.

There is something badly wrong when some have nothing, others too much to find room for. Recognition of such is giving rise to a new wave of minimalists such as Miriam Lancewood, a young Dutch woman who sold all her possessions to come and live in the New Zealand bush in a tent with her husband Peter, surviving on meagre supplies supplemented by hunting and foraging for edible plants; often cold, hungry and isolated. And while I'm not sold on washing my hair in a cup of morning urine, I agree that living a more authentic, real life creates its own energy and clarity.

To be honest, I'm not sure where I am on the stuff continuum between gear glutton and bartering off-the-grid freegan. I know you can be happy with less - I haven't bought anything new for a year - yet a big part of me remains hugely sentimental about the things I have in storage. I don't need them (who needs art, really?), but I just can't bring myself to get rid of them.

Storage units are sad places, despite the cheerful demeanour of the staff. Behind rows and rows of steel container doors are the hopes and dreams and worldly goods of lifetimes. It's amazing how little space it takes up. How the sum total of 40 years of scrimping and saving and hire purchases and holiday souvenirs and heirlooms fits in less than 5sq m. Ah, the things we own, the flimsy cardboard-walled, vacuum-packed, bubble-wrapped state of us; the accumulation of the unnecessary, the transitory nature of work and home, fleeting marriages, financial rugs pulled out from under. In 2009 there were 58,000 self-storage facilities worldwide, 46,000 in the US alone, taking up a land area equivalent to three times the island of Manhattan. Storage facilities are symptomatic of our consumerist society, where material abundance is mistaken for happiness, things are a panacea and the act of shopping fills a psychological hole.

Inside is like a Supermax prison: rows and rows of padlocked doors. Trundling a trolley down the corridor towards my own unit, I was reminded of that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the ark is put away in a huge facility, becoming just one of thousands of stacked wooden boxes. Feeling remarkably unmoved, I found a box marked "clothes'' - I remembered writing that very carefully, sometimes a nice hand is all you've got - and took it back out to Purakaunui. Opened, it contained purses with nothing in them, ballgowns and opera gloves.

If I had met myself coming the other way right then, I would have kicked me in the arse.