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Americans love our stuff. We love our stuff so much we’re willing to rent small rooms far away from our homes just to store all the stuff that won’t fit anywhere else—about 20% of the U.S. is paying for a storage unit. Most of those people are using their storage units exactly as intended—they’ve packed them with furniture, boxes of stuff, and even larger items like vehicles or appliances.

But a storage unit can be much more than just a place to dump all that junk you can’t squeeze into your tiny dwelling. In fact, a storage unit can be the ideal place to do a lot of other things. They’re secure, climate-controlled, and relatively private. Not to mention cheap: They cost an average of $185 per month. As long as you familiarize yourself with your local laws and read your rental agreement carefully, a storage unit can be a cost-effective place to do a lot more than store things.

What the laws allow

First things first: There are a lot of laws covering storage units and what they can and can’t be used for. These will vary from area to area, but there are a few constants. For one, you absolutely, positively cannot live in a storage unit—so don’t imagine you can throw down a rug and a futon and crash there every night. You also can’t use a storage unit as an office in the sense of literally running a business out of it (although you can use it for a business, as we’ll see).

And if you read a storage facility’s agreement, you’re also probably prohibited from storing food or animals in there. There may be a lot of other restrictions, so if you’re contemplating a storage unit as anything but a dumping ground, you should read the rental agreement carefully—violating it could get you evicted.

Create a personal gym

If you’d rather not go to a gym every month and get sweaty in front of total strangers, or if you have a bunch of great exercise equipment you can’t fit comfortably in your current home, a storage unit can be a terrific place to set up a small personal gym. It gets all that equipment out of the house and gives you a quiet, private space to work out.

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Credit: James R. Martin/Shutterstock

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