Park Model AirBnB, and the Ikea Rule

30 July 2017

Our last AirBnB was a park model, a little prefab place that was nothing more than a small trailer that wasn't meant to move much more than once. It had a little add on TV room and a carport, and was in one of those huge retirement complexes in Mesa. It was a different take on a rental because I also had the ulterior motive of getting Heather to try one out. After a couple of days Heather admitted that a month or two in one in a nice, entertaining place wouldn't be too bad.

I don't know where I picked this up, and I certainly had had little opportunity to use it, but somewhere along the line I encountered something called the Ikea rule. I think it had to do with storage units, but I think it applies to moving in general.

The gist of it is that it is not worth putting anything from Ikea, or anything similar, into storage. People stay in storage units way longer than they planned. That was certainly our experience when we moved from Tucson up to Mesa, and why I had nothing to do with storage units since. The girls had conned Heather into getting one "for a few months" during one of their condo moves. That one lasted for at least a couple years. I prefer not to know exactly how long. By the time you had a storage unit filled with Ikea for a while you would have paid more for storage that it would have cost to buy a new one of everything from Ikea.

We did allow for one small addendum to the Ikea rule. Many things like storage units are not continuously sized - you jump from one size to the next, with no options between. Our compromise was to identify things that fell under the domain of the Ikea rule, and if they pushed us to the next size unit then they had to go. If there was a little room left in the unit that was not needed for more legitimate items then their day of reckoning was deferred. This eventually caused some heartache on my last trip to the storage unit, but somehow the door rolled down. We'll see next time if it will roll back up.

We had to apply the same rule to the trailer for Chelsea. It was a big financial step from their biggest trailer hauled by the Land Cruiser to the next level, a truck or pod or something. When it was sitting right in front of you it was difficult to remember that it wasn't worth paying another grand to move a $200 buffet, literally from Ikea. At least I wouldn't have to put the next one together.

sv-hiatus.blogspot.com