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If you’ve ever pulled a winter coat out of a Redcar loft and caught that tell-tale musty smell, you already know what this article is about. Living on the coast is one of the best things about this town. It’s also one of the worst things about storing your belongings in it.
The numbers explain the smell. Across North East England, relative humidity averages 83% across the year. That’s air that never really dries out, indoors or under a shed roof.
On top of that, around 894mm of rain falls on 145 days in a typical year, so the ground and walls rarely get a proper chance to dry either. And roughly 60 nights of air frost put everything through freeze-and-thaw. That’s the air sitting in your garage, shed and loft, working on everything you’ve stored there.
Why does everything in my garage feel damp?
Because the air it lives in almost never dries out. Here’s the typical year that an unheated Redcar outbuilding goes through:
The frost figure matters more than people think. Sixty freeze-thaw nights a year means sixty condensation cycles. Cold air can’t hold moisture, so overnight it beads onto every cold surface in the building: tools, furniture, boxes. Then the day warms up, the air takes the moisture back, and the next clear night it does it all again.
Cardboard boxes wick it up from the floor. Fabric and mattresses take it straight from the air.
What does sea air actually do to stored belongings?
Salt makes coastal damp worse than inland damp. Salt particles in sea air are hygroscopic, which means they attract water and hold it against surfaces. It’s why cars rust faster at the seaside, and why the effect reaches well beyond the seafront.
On your stored belongings, the pattern is predictable. Metal goes first: tools, bike chains, garden machinery and hinges pick up surface rust within months. Wood swells, veneers lift, and drawers that slid smoothly start to stick.
Fabric and leather grow mould in still, humid air, usually starting where the material touches a cold wall. Electronics suffer quietly, as corrosion creeps across contacts and circuit boards.
None of this is dramatic. It’s slow, silent, and you find out when you unpack.
Which storage spots at home are the worst?
Ranked by risk, from the typical Redcar home:
- The shed. Single-skin, unheated, and usually the dampest structure on the property.
- The garage. Better roofed but rarely damp-proofed, and the concrete floor is a moisture source in its own right.
- The loft. Drier in summer, but it swings between temperature extremes, and roof condensation drips are common above the insulation line.
- Under the stairs or the spare room. Fine for climate, terrible for space. This is where the “we’ll just keep it in the house” plan usually ends.
How to damp-proof anything you store
Wherever your things end up (shed, garage or a storage unit), the same checklist protects them:
- Everything clean and bone dry before it’s packed. Moisture you seal in is mould you unpack.
- Off the floor. Pallets, battens or even a layer of bricks. Air needs to circulate underneath.
- Breathable covers, never polythene sheeting, on furniture and mattresses. Plastic traps moisture against the surface and makes things worse.
- Silica gel or moisture traps inside boxes and wardrobes. Cheap, and they genuinely work in enclosed spaces.
- Metal lightly oiled or waxed (tools, bikes, machinery), then ideally wrapped in a dry cloth, not plastic.
- Leave walking space between items and walls. The coldest surface in the room is where condensation forms first.
- Check monthly. Damp caught early is a wipe-down; damp caught in spring is a skip run.
When does indoor self storage make sense?
When the maths of replacing things overtakes the cost of protecting them. A sofa, a decent bike, a wardrobe of clothes and a toolbox add up to far more than a few months of storage. A dry, ventilated indoor unit takes the coastal-air problem out of the picture entirely, without eating your garage.
Our Redcar storage units are five minutes from the seafront on Limerick Road, so we deal with this climate every day. We’re happy to talk through what you’re storing and whether it needs indoor space or a container will do. That’s a genuine question to ask, because the honest answer is sometimes the cheaper one.
