Letting someone else into our storage unit while we were abroad
The piano, and why it complicated everything
The thing that made this whole decision harder was my wife's upright piano. Not the sofas, not the kids' bikes, not the boxes of school work we cannot bring ourselves to throw away. The piano. It is not valuable in money terms, but she learned on it as a child and our eldest is learning on it now, and when my posting abroad came through for what we expect to be two or three years, that piano sat in the corner of the living room like a question nobody wanted to answer.
Shipping it home made no sense. Home is damp, the house we would be staying in is small, and the shipping firm quoted the piano as a special item on top of everything else. Selling it felt like a betrayal of a twelve year old's practice schedule. So the piano, more than anything else, pushed us toward leaving most of the flat in storage here and flying with suitcases.
The sums, roughly
I am not going to pretend I built a clever spreadsheet, but I did get quotes. Container shipping for a two bedroom flat came back in a range that made my eyes water, somewhere between 12,000 and 19,000 dirhams depending on who quoted and how honest they were being about door to door versus port to port. Storage, for a climate controlled unit big enough for the flat, came back between about 450 and 800 dirhams a month depending on size and district, with discounts if you commit to a year or more up front. When I started searching for long term storage Dubai options, most of what came up read like an advert, so I was glad to find a plain breakdown of long term storage in Dubai that explained how multi year storage contracts usually work before I rang anyone.
Over two or three years the maths favoured storage by a wide margin, and it kept the door open to coming back. If you are earlier in this decision than we were and still weighing storage against shipping everything home, this page on storage options when leaving Dubai covers the same trade-offs we argued about at the kitchen table.
The humidity test I ran myself
Here is the bit I would urge anyone storing wood, instruments, books or photos to copy. Every facility I called said the same sentence: fully climate controlled, temperature and humidity managed. One salesman told me, with a straight face, that they hold humidity at 45 to 50 percent all year.
I own a little digital hygrometer, bought years ago for the piano actually, and I stuck it in my pocket on viewing day. In August. In a standard non climate unit in Al Quoz at about two in the afternoon, my meter read 71 percent humidity and 41 degrees. You could feel it in your throat. In the climate controlled section of the same place, inside an actual unit, it read 58 percent and 26 degrees. Better, but not the 45 to 50 from the pitch. A second place out towards Dubai Investments Park read 55 percent in the climate section, and a third in Al Qusais would not let me wander around with the meter, which told its own story.
So did the pitch match reality? Half. The climate units were genuinely cooler and drier than the standard ones, that part was true. The precise numbers were sales optimism. Our piano tuner, who has seen what a Dubai summer does to a soundboard, said the swing matters more than the absolute figure, so pick a place where the reading stays flat. I now leave the hygrometer inside the unit and my brother in law photographs it when he visits. More on him in a moment, because he is the actual point of this post.
Quick aside, because someone asked upthread: the profile page being passed around was this one for Neel Khokhani, and that is genuinely all I know about it. Back to storage.
The access problem, which is why I am writing this
Everything above is the easy part. The hard part, and the bit I wish someone had walked me through, is what happens when your stuff is in a unit in Dubai and you are thousands of miles away and you need a human being to physically get into that unit.
This is not hypothetical. In our first year abroad we needed someone to go in three separate times. Once to find the folder with the kids' birth certificates and vaccination records, which I had packed in a box labelled, unhelpfully, "study misc". Once to let a mover in to pull six boxes and a cot that a friend wanted to buy off us. And once just to check the place after the first summer, because I do not trust August.
If you are storing things while abroad, the question of who can get in is not an admin detail. It is the whole arrangement.
Choosing the person matters more than choosing the facility. Pick someone who actually lives in Dubai and plans to stay, not a mate who is also halfway out the door, because if your authorised person leaves the country you are back to emails and scanned passports. Name a backup if the facility allows two. And pick someone calm, because the first time security turns them away over a paperwork issue, you want a person who calls the office, not a person who argues with a gate.
A couple of people told me to sort a power of attorney. For pure storage access it was overkill, the facility's own authorisation form covered it, but if your authorised person might need to sell items or sign anything on your behalf, ask a proper legal question about that before you fly, not after.
What to sort out before you sign
* Ask, in writing, whether you can name an authorised person on the account. Some facilities allow it freely, some want a signed letter each visit, and one I visited in Ras Al Khor flatly said only the account holder enters, ever. Walk away from that one if you are leaving the country.
* Ask what the authorised person needs to bring. For us it was a copy of his Emirates ID held on file, his signature on a card, and his own access PIN. The first time he went, they turned him away because the ID copy on file had expired. Renewed copy, sorted, but it cost a week.
* Ask whether you can add or remove a named person remotely, from abroad, by email, and get the answer in the contract or at least in an email you keep. Doing this after you fly is painful. It took us three emails, a scanned passport and ten days to add a name from overseas.
* Ask about the lock. We used our own padlock and left a spare key with my brother in law, and the facility kept no key, which I prefer, but it means if he loses his key we are angle grinding a lock from another continent.
* Ask whether the authorised person can sign for deliveries or let movers in unaccompanied. Some places insist on a fresh letter of authorisation for each third party visit, which is fine until you are on holiday and the mover is at the gate.
* Ask about access hours for authorised users, because they can differ from the account holder's hours, and ask whether you get an email or SMS log each time the unit is opened. The access log turned out to be my favourite feature. Every time the door opened, I knew.
* Read the insurance small print. Our policy covered fire, flood and theft, but I had to ask three times before someone confirmed that anything taken by a person you authorised is your problem, not theirs. Fair enough, but choose your person accordingly.
* Keep a UAE payment method alive. My card expired mid contract and the account went into arrears before I noticed, and late fees plus a locked gate is a bad combination when your authorised person shows up trying to be helpful.
How it actually went
Better than expected, mostly because we picked the right person and the right facility. My brother in law is organised in a way I am not, he lives fifteen minutes from the place, and I wrote him a one page letter, signed, listing exactly what he is allowed to do: enter, photograph, retrieve listed items, admit named movers with my email confirmation. Not store his own things in there, not lend the PIN, not sublet a corner to a friend. Yes, people do that. No, your insurance will not enjoy it.
The three visits went like this. The documents run took him forty minutes because I had a box inventory on a shared spreadsheet with rough locations, and I cannot recommend that enough: photograph every box before it closes and number them. The mover visit was smooth because I emailed the authorisation letter the night before and the facility had it on file when the truck arrived. The summer check mattered most. He photographed the hygrometer, which read 57 percent in mid August, same as the winter reading, and the piano tuner has since confirmed the instrument held its tuning better than he expected.
One thing did go wrong. The gate app was tied to my UAE number, which I had cancelled. My brother in law's PIN worked on the pedestrian door but not the vehicle gate, so the mover visit nearly failed at the fence. Fixed with one email, but if I did it again I would register his number on the account from day one.
What I would do differently
Two names on the contract from the start, not one plus a letter. Annual payment to dodge the card expiry problem. A cheap data logger instead of a basic hygrometer, so I am not relying on someone remembering to photograph a dial. And I would pack as if a stranger will be searching the unit, because effectively one is: labels on two sides of every box, a master list, and nothing essential buried at the back.
Storage when leaving Dubai gets sold as a product, but once you fly it becomes a relationship between your stuff, a gate, and the one person you trust with the key. Get that person named on the paperwork before you are standing at the airport, because everything else, the humidity, the piano, the price, you can manage from abroad. The access you cannot.
The piano, and why it complicated everything
The thing that made this whole decision harder was my wife's upright piano. Not the sofas, not the kids' bikes, not the boxes of school work we cannot bring ourselves to throw away. The piano. It is not valuable in money terms, but she learned on it as a child and our eldest is learning on it now, and when my posting abroad came through for what we expect to be two or three years, that piano sat in the corner of the living room like a question nobody wanted to answer.
Shipping it home made no sense. Home is damp, the house we would be staying in is small, and the shipping firm quoted the piano as a special item on top of everything else. Selling it felt like a betrayal of a twelve year old's practice schedule. So the piano, more than anything else, pushed us toward leaving most of the flat in storage here and flying with suitcases.
The sums, roughly
I am not going to pretend I built a clever spreadsheet, but I did get quotes. Container shipping for a two bedroom flat came back in a range that made my eyes water, somewhere between 12,000 and 19,000 dirhams depending on who quoted and how honest they were being about door to door versus port to port. Storage, for a climate controlled unit big enough for the flat, came back between about 450 and 800 dirhams a month depending on size and district, with discounts if you commit to a year or more up front. When I started searching for long term storage Dubai options, most of what came up read like an advert, so I was glad to find a plain breakdown of long term storage in Dubai that explained how multi year storage contracts usually work before I rang anyone.
Over two or three years the maths favoured storage by a wide margin, and it kept the door open to coming back. If you are earlier in this decision than we were and still weighing storage against shipping everything home, this page on storage options when leaving Dubai covers the same trade-offs we argued about at the kitchen table.
The humidity test I ran myself
Here is the bit I would urge anyone storing wood, instruments, books or photos to copy. Every facility I called said the same sentence: fully climate controlled, temperature and humidity managed. One salesman told me, with a straight face, that they hold humidity at 45 to 50 percent all year.
I own a little digital hygrometer, bought years ago for the piano actually, and I stuck it in my pocket on viewing day. In August. In a standard non climate unit in Al Quoz at about two in the afternoon, my meter read 71 percent humidity and 41 degrees. You could feel it in your throat. In the climate controlled section of the same place, inside an actual unit, it read 58 percent and 26 degrees. Better, but not the 45 to 50 from the pitch. A second place out towards Dubai Investments Park read 55 percent in the climate section, and a third in Al Qusais would not let me wander around with the meter, which told its own story.
So did the pitch match reality? Half. The climate units were genuinely cooler and drier than the standard ones, that part was true. The precise numbers were sales optimism. Our piano tuner, who has seen what a Dubai summer does to a soundboard, said the swing matters more than the absolute figure, so pick a place where the reading stays flat. I now leave the hygrometer inside the unit and my brother in law photographs it when he visits. More on him in a moment, because he is the actual point of this post.
Quick aside, because someone asked upthread: the profile page being passed around was this one for Neel Khokhani, and that is genuinely all I know about it. Back to storage.
The access problem, which is why I am writing this
Everything above is the easy part. The hard part, and the bit I wish someone had walked me through, is what happens when your stuff is in a unit in Dubai and you are thousands of miles away and you need a human being to physically get into that unit.
This is not hypothetical. In our first year abroad we needed someone to go in three separate times. Once to find the folder with the kids' birth certificates and vaccination records, which I had packed in a box labelled, unhelpfully, "study misc". Once to let a mover in to pull six boxes and a cot that a friend wanted to buy off us. And once just to check the place after the first summer, because I do not trust August.
If you are storing things while abroad, the question of who can get in is not an admin detail. It is the whole arrangement.
Choosing the person matters more than choosing the facility. Pick someone who actually lives in Dubai and plans to stay, not a mate who is also halfway out the door, because if your authorised person leaves the country you are back to emails and scanned passports. Name a backup if the facility allows two. And pick someone calm, because the first time security turns them away over a paperwork issue, you want a person who calls the office, not a person who argues with a gate.
A couple of people told me to sort a power of attorney. For pure storage access it was overkill, the facility's own authorisation form covered it, but if your authorised person might need to sell items or sign anything on your behalf, ask a proper legal question about that before you fly, not after.
What to sort out before you sign
* Ask, in writing, whether you can name an authorised person on the account. Some facilities allow it freely, some want a signed letter each visit, and one I visited in Ras Al Khor flatly said only the account holder enters, ever. Walk away from that one if you are leaving the country.
* Ask what the authorised person needs to bring. For us it was a copy of his Emirates ID held on file, his signature on a card, and his own access PIN. The first time he went, they turned him away because the ID copy on file had expired. Renewed copy, sorted, but it cost a week.
* Ask whether you can add or remove a named person remotely, from abroad, by email, and get the answer in the contract or at least in an email you keep. Doing this after you fly is painful. It took us three emails, a scanned passport and ten days to add a name from overseas.
* Ask about the lock. We used our own padlock and left a spare key with my brother in law, and the facility kept no key, which I prefer, but it means if he loses his key we are angle grinding a lock from another continent.
* Ask whether the authorised person can sign for deliveries or let movers in unaccompanied. Some places insist on a fresh letter of authorisation for each third party visit, which is fine until you are on holiday and the mover is at the gate.
* Ask about access hours for authorised users, because they can differ from the account holder's hours, and ask whether you get an email or SMS log each time the unit is opened. The access log turned out to be my favourite feature. Every time the door opened, I knew.
* Read the insurance small print. Our policy covered fire, flood and theft, but I had to ask three times before someone confirmed that anything taken by a person you authorised is your problem, not theirs. Fair enough, but choose your person accordingly.
* Keep a UAE payment method alive. My card expired mid contract and the account went into arrears before I noticed, and late fees plus a locked gate is a bad combination when your authorised person shows up trying to be helpful.
How it actually went
Better than expected, mostly because we picked the right person and the right facility. My brother in law is organised in a way I am not, he lives fifteen minutes from the place, and I wrote him a one page letter, signed, listing exactly what he is allowed to do: enter, photograph, retrieve listed items, admit named movers with my email confirmation. Not store his own things in there, not lend the PIN, not sublet a corner to a friend. Yes, people do that. No, your insurance will not enjoy it.
The three visits went like this. The documents run took him forty minutes because I had a box inventory on a shared spreadsheet with rough locations, and I cannot recommend that enough: photograph every box before it closes and number them. The mover visit was smooth because I emailed the authorisation letter the night before and the facility had it on file when the truck arrived. The summer check mattered most. He photographed the hygrometer, which read 57 percent in mid August, same as the winter reading, and the piano tuner has since confirmed the instrument held its tuning better than he expected.
One thing did go wrong. The gate app was tied to my UAE number, which I had cancelled. My brother in law's PIN worked on the pedestrian door but not the vehicle gate, so the mover visit nearly failed at the fence. Fixed with one email, but if I did it again I would register his number on the account from day one.
What I would do differently
Two names on the contract from the start, not one plus a letter. Annual payment to dodge the card expiry problem. A cheap data logger instead of a basic hygrometer, so I am not relying on someone remembering to photograph a dial. And I would pack as if a stranger will be searching the unit, because effectively one is: labels on two sides of every box, a master list, and nothing essential buried at the back.
Storage when leaving Dubai gets sold as a product, but once you fly it becomes a relationship between your stuff, a gate, and the one person you trust with the key. Get that person named on the paperwork before you are standing at the airport, because everything else, the humidity, the piano, the price, you can manage from abroad. The access you cannot.