Dramas of storage

Mick has made great in-roads into moving our belongings from home to our storage area.  His shed / workshop is looking decidedly less full of stuff.  We finally made plans yesterday (and had an argument in the process!) about where and how to store everything in the area we have set aside.  It looks like a huge space but I know that very quickly it will fill up.  Mick's built some bays of shelving (like 6 giant bookshelves) which are already half full of items from his workshop.  I've refused to bring household stuff there until we sort out where it will go.

This was the source of the argument - I want the household contents on one side of the room and his workshop and outdoor things on the other side.  He and I have different ways of going about things.  Mick just starts doing whatever he has to do like a bull at a gate.  From the first decision to store our belongings in that space he's been carting trailer loads out there and stacking it up all over the place (he'll move it later).  I've tried to get him to work out where everything should go for best access to it later, but he's not into talking about things -just doing them!  I like to plan how and where to store things, to avoid double handling them, and to make sure I know where to find them again.  I'm making lists of what is in each box and numbering them.  I figure that most of these things will be stored here for years - a couple of years before we go to the UK and maybe a couple more while we are there.  Who knows what may come after that.

We'll be constantly at logger-heads if I have to negotiate his stacks of things to get to what we need out.  He wanted me to start bringing my boxes of household items and put them on the spare shelves above and below the shelves he has already put things on (tins of nails and screws, tools, bottles and jars of paint, solvents and all sorts of other workshop things).  I can just picture it - boxes of books, dinnerware, ornaments etc being showered with rubble as he digs through the stuff he has stored on the shelves above them.  Then when I need something out I'll be covered in dust and sawdust and grease while trying to retrieve the box I want out.  The shelving bays face each other with space to walk in between, but not so much space that you can easily avoid brushing against the opposite side.

The other issue was that although it looks like lots of shelving, it is nowhere near enough to store all the boxes we're going to have.  We need at least that much again.  Mick looked in me in disbelief - how much stuff did I think we had?!  Eventually he agreed to the separate sides of the room, and to build another set of shelving.  Time will tell which of us was right about the amount of shelving we'll need!   I figured one big blow out argument was preferable to possibly years of grumbling and squabbling.  We stood in the middle of that room yelling and waving our arms about and then we got over it.  Now it will be full steam ahead.