COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW THE DECLINING MARKET FOR ANTIQUES IS FUELING THE SELF-STORAGE BOOM 
“My mom has an amazing collection of stuff like this. I think about it all the time. . . . worried what I’m going to to with my great great grandfather’s table, and my great grandmother’s silver. I don’t have the room for it at this point in my life . . . but I don’t want to give it away. I almost feel like I need to get a storage unit for it.” [Chef DB, commenting on The Underappreciated Riches of Houston’s Antique Set]
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Storage Facilities
The old Wabash Feed & Garden building on Washington Ave. may still be sorting out its current relationship status, and missing the company of Los Dos Amigos  and Premo’s Grocery (knocked down across the street last year) — but at least it’s no longer the only property on the corner with an out of date sign (as pictured in the shot above from a reader). The new Uncle Bob’s Self Storage across the street, which replaced Premo’s and Los Dos Amigos, is already waiting on a branding swap-out — the storage company acquired Life Storage in July and decided to take the new name, simplifying its box-of-boxes logo in the process. The 6-story storage midrise is set toward the corner with Malone St. where Premo’s stood, while Los Dos Amigos got the parking-lot treatment:
All Boxed Up
The doors opened last week at that 4-story 100,000-sq.-ft. storage facility that has replaced the boarded-up Shell Food Mart just west of the corner of Richmond  and Woodhead — itself a makeover of the 24-hour Richwood Market, known back in the day as Freaky Foods (affectionately or not). The 4-story building started going up next to King Cole Liquor some time after the nearby trees got cleared out about a year ago (with the city’s OK, Annise Parker said at the time).
Big Tex has since widened the sidewalks and added some new baby trees in a series of landscaped rectangles along Richmond; the company’s press release also says there’s gonna be an Art Wall.
- Big Tex Storage Montrose Opens in Houston [PRWeb]
- Previously on Swamplot:Â Mayor Parker Clears Up Richmond Ave Shell Station Self Storage Tree Removal Mystery;Â The Old Freaky Foods on Richmond Ave Is Boarded Up and Looking Forlorn
Photos: Big Tex Storage via Urbannizer (panoramic of Big Tex at 1810 Richmond Ave.), Swamplot inbox (2014 shot of 1810 Richmond Ave.)
Boxes on Richmond
Right next door to the fairways of the Wildcat Golf Club, Fairway Energy Partners is moving forward with plans announced this summer to put nearly half a billion gallons of crude oil back into the ground, right in the center of the once-wild Pierce Junction oil field just south of the Inner Loop between S. Main St. and Highway 288. (The field, which a 1956 Time Magazine article called the site of “the biggest of all Gulf Coast oil booms,” still pumps out oil.) Fairway announced in November that they’ve picked engineers to help them retrofit 3 of the 8 man-made caverns dissolved into the Pierce Junction salt dome for crude storage. A dense ring of current and closed oil wells (mapped as green dots above) traces the uppermost reach of the migrant salt, buried approximately 950 feet below the surface and extending several miles deep to its source layer.
Partners in Brine
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE RENT VS. RE-BUY DECISION 
“I once rented a self storage unit. My wife (then girlfriend) and I were condensing from two apartments to one. After a year and a half of paying the rental fee, I did the math. For what I had paid on the storage unit, I could have bought, brand new, everything I was storing in it. So we ended up emptying the unit and tossing whatever we didn’t immediately have use for. Bottom line, the storage unit was some of the worst money I’ve spent in my entire life. I suspect that’s often the case.” [Walt, commenting on Old Prince’s Hamburger Sign Is Leaving North Shepherd for Points Even Further North] Illustration: Lulu
The lone residential unit atop the Proguard Self Storage office at the corner of Heights Blvd. and Center St. is available for you to rent — and of course fill up with stuff. Unlike the other units located on the premises, this one comes with a kitchen, a washer and dryer, and an actual bathroom, but lacks roll-up doors. Like the other units, it’s all bills paid. Shaded parking is available under this wooden structure against the north fence, past the controlled-access gate:
Teevee news cameras provide a glimpse of the open-plan home fashioned out of a 12-ft.-by-25-ft. RV and boat storage unit in a long shed across the street from the I-10 East Golden Corral Restaurant. Prince and Charlomane Leonard have their home of 3 years all to themselves now, but they’re not happy about it: After a single 3-hour visit from Harris County’s Child Protective Services last month, the couple’s 6 children, ages 2 through 12, were removed from the home on McNair St. near Sheffield Blvd., which was declared an “unsafe environment” for the children. The Chronicle‘s Anita Hassan reports the Leonards had been planning to build a home for themselves on land they own in Liberty County, but couldn’t get a loan.
“One of the construction workers told me that a self-storage place is going in here,” reports the Swamplot reader who sent in these photos of the “massive pile and hole” taking shape at 2412 W. Holcombe Blvd., on the northwest corner of the Morningside intersection, west of the Texas Medical Center. Look, flatlanders, before it’s gone: This is kinda what an actual hill looks like!
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A QUICK AND EASY WAY TO DECIDE WHAT TO KEEP AND WHAT TO GIVE AWAY “I can create a cost model for any particular item based on the cubic feet of space it requires for storage vs. the price per cubic foot of space in the house.* (Actual monthly cost, NOT “sale price per foot,†because taxes and interest are real things.) Measure the cost of keeping it for X period of time, vs. replacing it at an expected point in the future combined with the fuzzy application of inconvenience factors (can it only be purchased via a 1-hour drive, or week-long wait for delivery?) and criticality (would I have a broken pipe for days if I don’t have this pipe wrench?) and I have a good, solid grasp on any individual item and whether its worth keeping based on the expected frequency of its utility. If the cost of keeping it during the periods of uselessness exceeds the weighted replacement cost by more than 10%, it’s gone. Unfortunately, this model -can not- be applied to items with a sentimental factor value of greater than 0.3. Sure recipe for a very long argument with the SO. * – in a more functionally perfect model, the overall value of a particular sq. ft. of space would be [weighted] on many factors such as its visibility, ease of access, specialized design, etc. However, these factors complicate the model to such a degree that I’d then have to write some software to handle it, and then I’d have the further conjoining restraint of cost of permanent storage for the data as well as the physical items. I usually determine that the feedback cycle that rears its head in the process isn’t worth the effort, and the generalized model works well enough.” [drone, commenting on Comment of the Day: How Houston’s East Enders Have Rid Themselves of Clutter]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: SO WE CAN LIVE MORE COMFORTABLY IN SMALLER HOMES “The self-storage industry in this country is worth over $20 Billion a year in revenues . . . there are over 46,500 facilities in existence with a total combined area of 2.21 Billion sq.ft. Self-storage is almost entirely a US phenomenon. There are only 12,000 facilities elsewhere in the world and 3,000 of those are in Canada. This all begs the question, ‘Why on earth do we store so much more crap than anyone else?'” [Jimbo, commenting on Comment of the Day: Follow the Mini Storage]