Long story short, I live in a condo downtown with secure, climate-controlled underground parking that is explicitly not a workspace or a space for storing anything other than vehicles, and I really love my home and lifestyle. In order to fill my need for workspace, tool storage, and a home for projects, I've been sharing cheap rental workshop space with a few car buddies for the past decade or so, and life has been great. The space is cheap, poorly-maintained, and the landlord is unhinged, unreasonable and massively disorganized, but it has been worth the hassle because the price is around half of what we would pay for anything else comparable. We are month-to-month, with a history of wacky landlord agitation every few years that dies down after a few weeks/months if you keep your head down.
The community across the other units (giant warehouse chopped up into dozens of 1500-5000 sq ft units) used to be great, but has largely died recently, and the landlord has started surprise inspections, veiled threats, eviction notices, and amped up the craziness and personal attacks by a big margin. I'm losing hair and gaining ulcers just by thinking about it. I'm done dealing with the craziness. I don't know if they are prepping to sell, hoping to kick everyone out and double rent, hoping to kick the "dirty car guys and fabricators" out and get all the "clean and presentable" print shops, embroiderers, noodle makers, or whatever else in, but I'm not waiting around for the other shoe to drop on a Plan B and Plan C.
I might need to move out in a matter of weeks, and currently have one project car (no rear suspension/subframe) up on blocks, and have recently reduced four project motorcycles at the shop down to one running at my condo and one non-running (but recently reassembled and now rolling) at the shop. I have a big toolbox, lathe, sandblaster, parts washer, milling machine, industrial shelving full of parts, pallet racks, half-share in a MIG setup, half-share in a two-post lift, a few sets of wheels/tires, etc. So a lot to move/store....probably not gonna fit in a 10x15!
On short notice, arranging new workspace is probably unrealistic, so I'm looking into renting storage space to bridge until I can find/rent/buy an adequate workshop. I've been looking at storage units, but they are often fussy about vehicle storage indoors, and finding a large enough unit with exterior ground-level access isn't as easy as it sounds. And no, we aren't fitting my machine tools on the cutesy little carts provided to roll them into the elevator to the upstairs unit.
I started searching alternative options and came up with some families or individuals renting out detached garages on Craigslist or neighbor.com or similar, typically only as storage (no workspace) but often for half price of the commercial places, typically bigger spaces, possibly hours-limited access, more likely a grade that is friendly to offloading machine tools from a lift gate or pallet jack, and possibly lower-key/more secure???
Anyone done anything like this before? Any words of advice?
