I would have posted this long ago, but laziness kept me from getting around to it!
We had our whole house worth of things (furniture and everything else) at SB Storage for about a year and a half after we moved out of our house since we were going out of the country for awhile, and after we got back it took us awhile to get settled (staying with friends and family) before we could get all our stuff out. We never meant to have our stuff stored for that long. When we did get back from being out of the country, we got a few things in the front of the unit (the unit was pretty jam packed) like clothes and some other essential items, but we never went to the middle or back (it was a big 10 X 20 unit) because we literally packed it too tightly.
Anyway, by the time I was finally able to rent a truck and pack everything once we got a new place, I discovered there had been some kind of rodent problem that chewed through several boxes and ruined two of our futons. There were rat droppings EVERYWHERE and little torn up pieces of box and paper everywhere too - it was a mess. In fact, one of the futons when we got it home had some small creature (bigger than a rat) who had died inside of it - yuck! Overall there was a few hundred dollars worth of damage.
I took pictures and submitted it to the facility. The woman who responded to my calls and the e-mails was very nice, but as it turned out the owners didn't care at all, or at least would pay me NOTHING. Apparently it's all in the contract I signed that any damage I'm liable for. Ok, so my fault, right? Well, there's following a contract to the letter of the law, and there's doing the right thing. How much do you want to bet that if I hadn't cleaned up all the torn up boxes and rat droppings that they would have charged me a cleaning fee? We had to pay to have things replaced and fixed. They're free and clear legally, but I guess they have their own consciences to deal with.
The moral of the story for you? Read the contract, don't expect them to deviate from it one iota... and oh yeah, they have a rat problem so your stuff isn't safe. read more