Got overflow? Purge, then organize your self-storage unit

America, you've got stuff.

Amish armoires and barbecue grills. Granddad's beer-stein collection and grandma's mahogany dining-room table. Christmas decorations and oak veneer Malm chests you bought at Ikea for your teens.

Chances are you've piled it all into a self-storage unit.

So have a few of your fellow Americans, judging by the 2.2 billion square feet of self-storage facilities peppering the country.

What's with that? Why are we paying to store stuff we don't — or almost never — use?

Is it because you're between homes? A sentimental softy? Or do you just not have time to sort through 10 years of Architectural Digests and your husband's college CD collection?

Grant K. Gibson understands your conundrum. The San Francisco-based interior designer just helped a client winnow down the contents of a $1,000-a-month storage unit.

"We sorted through everything, and we brought it all into the basement of their home and stored it in large Tupperware-type things and labeled them," he says. "And then we got rid of all the junk."

Gibson, like most designers, has his own self-storage. He's got a small ($90-a-month) unit filled with some furniture and leftover fabrics (never know when a project's going to need repair) and a blow-up bed. It helps him keep his own house orderly. This is a guy, we should note, who moved from a 200-square-foot New York apartment to a 250-square-foot place in San Francisco to a 1,000-square-foot apartment — and is dreaming of a house.

"If I see something that I think — this is just so beautiful maybe I can use that someday when I buy a house — I store it," he says. "I think that's sort of what I see clients doing as well." Designers often store finds they know that clients will someday use, and even pieces that they rotate in and out of their own homes. It's a well-known hazard of those who love to decorate.

New York uber-designer Miles Redd used to have self-storage space. One day, though, "I looked at what I paid in storage, and I got rid of it. I do not want to be attached to this kind of stuff," he says, of items that ranged from furniture purchased for interior decorating projects to books.

It has, he says, taken his mother 10 years to sift through all the stuff in his grandmother's home ("a Depression-era baby — she saved string"). "I don't want that kind of legacy."