If you'll soon be downsizing and you intend to put some items that you're unlikely to have room for in your new place into a storage facility, here are some tips to follow.
Put together a collection of items that may or may not fit into your new home
Before you've moved into your new smaller place, you might not be totally sure how much of your possessions you'll actually be able to fit into it. Only after you've unpacked your must-have items, arranged the furniture and perhaps purchased some storage accessories, will you know just how much of your stuff you can comfortably store on the property. As such, before the move, you may want to put together a collection of the items that you don't consider to be essential for daily life, but which you'd like to keep in your new home if there's space leftover when you move in. This might include kitchen gadgets that you only use on the weekends (like a waffle maker) or your collection of movie memorabilia.
You should put these items at the very front of the storage unit, and put other, very large items, which you know for certain will not fit into the new place (such as your treadmill or lawnmower) farther back inside the unit. Doing this will mean that if you discover you do have more storage space than you expected to have in the new place and you decide to add a few of the non-essential, but nice-to-have items from the unit to your new home, collecting them will take minutes, rather than, for example, an hour, in the way that it might if they were scattered all around the back walls and corners of the crowded unit.
Be brutally honest regarding what items you should put into storage and which you should get rid of
If you're downsizing indefinitely, and have no plans to move to a bigger property again, you should try to be strict with yourself when deciding which of your items need to go into storage and which of them you'd be better off selling, recycling or donating. For example, if you had a lot of gardening tools for your old home's large garden, and really enjoyed taking care of it, you might be tempted to hold onto your gardening tool collection, for sentimental reasons, even though your new home has a tiny, mostly paved outdoor space with very little room for plants.
Holding onto these items that you won't use would mean you might have to pay for a larger storage unit than you really need, in order to accommodate these objects. By selling or donating them, you might be able to fit your possessions into a smaller, less costly unit and the gardening tools could be put to good use in someone else's outdoor space.