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Anyone got experience of renting garages/lockups?


Muel

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There are some garages up for rent just round the corner for £10 a week. That seems a bit cheap to me to be legit, but in more desirable areas of Sheffield the most I've seen for similar garages is about £17 so the price seems believable I reckon.

How do I go about checking it out though? Contracts/legal stuff etc?

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My old council lockup was about £3 a week about 10 years ago, I got more shit stolen from it than I would have just leaving it all over the street... They're so cheap because they generally have no electric, which is more of a pain in the arse than you could ever imagine.

Contracts usually state that the car stored has to be in such a condition that you could drive it away at a minutes notice, so no major projects... Which everyone ignores :)

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The units I've rented from private landlords basically put you responsible for everything, bills, damages, rates etc, and they are considerably more expensive. For the kind of money you're looking at, it'll be as I said, strictly for storing shit and nothing more.

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I want to store a motorbike in in, which will always be rideable and reliable etc.

Rich, what rates? I essentially want a big box with a lock on it. Lack of electricity will be a bit annoying but not the end of the world.

The garages in question are tucked away in a fairly decent area of Sheffield that is relatively quiet, although I guess they're still a target for scumbags. They're at the back of a load of houses rather than an industrial estate though so I guess less likely to be broken into?

EDIT: Thanks for the link, I'll have a read. :)

Edited by Muel
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My lockup was on a public street surrounded by houses, got broken into more times than I can remember. At one point they were making a regular thing of it, leaving tools behind with a view to coming back (basically putting the car back together to try and steal it), so I ended up pocketing a load of their tools and a trolley jack :)

There won't be rates on a lockup but once you get over a certain amount of floor space the council will sting you for business rates which are stupidly expensive!

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I've just wandered up there, it's a pretty quiet area and the garages are tucked away. I guess that could make them more of a target though...

Very excited/scary stuff! Basically I now earn enough that I can run a decent motorbike, as I can insure most big fast bikes for £300 or less. I was looking at cars but anything mildly exciting is over £1500 and I'm not willing to drive a Micra.

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All I can recommend is putting some mighty extra locks on it, the extra 2 I put on mine were removed with the aforementioned trolley jack!

The guy who lives overlooking these garages caught them getting away once, in a dinghy on the canal beside them :P

Then again, for all my stories of crime and woe, I didn't really do myself any favours, I was there all the time so lots of people must have seen all the shit (and it was mostly shit :lol:) in there.

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I don't have a car licence, so I'd need that first...

I have 3 years of no claims on a bike, so anything worth less than £2k that isn't a super sports bike will cost me under £300 to insure fully comp.

It'll be well locked up haha, I'll be enquiring about fitting a ground anchor too, although in the real world if a scumbag decides they want it, nothing really is going to stop them.

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Keep the bike out in the open with a decent cover if you desperately need to protect it from the elements and use an almax chain with a decent ground anchor. The only way to get through an almax is grind or burn it, neither of which at going to be easy to conceal in public view. It absolutely must be tied down with the almax though as it's too easy to pick bikes up with a pair of scaffold tubes and cart it into a van, but then you know this :)

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I don't have a ground anchor though, and don't know of one near by, and I'm not laying up a decent bike for the winter outside, definitely need to have a garage/lockup to store it in.

Hopefully the landlord will let me fit a ground anchor as well.

On the downside, the garages round the corner have all been rented now, and there aren't any more advertised at the moment within about 2 miles, and I want a 5 min walk at most.

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That was the plan, but inside the lockup. :P

Main issue is I live in a flat, and there's no way I can fit a ground anchor outside, the landlord wouldn't allow it.

There's more chance of being allowed to fit one inside a lockup, and if it costs £10 a week to keep my bike dry and slightly more secure then it's worth it.

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Yeah, as you've gathered by now that's a completely believable rate for a non-powered single garage. I used to rent a council one around the back of the house for £7 a week. In over 10 years of living here, I've never seen one of the ones here get broken into, but then again in 6 years of driving and parking my car on the road here (the garage was for a 2nd car) the worst I've ever had's my wing mirror smashed once, and I've never heard of any neighbors cars getting broken into/damaged. If you're looking at one close to home I'm guessing you'll know what the area's like.

The one I had was actually impressively dry, I left some unprotected mild steel in there for over a year and it looked the same as the day I chucked it in the corner. Ideal for keeping a bike/car that's on the road, so you can work on it else-ware, but you don't want to leave out in the open.

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The only time I've asked to put a ground anchor into a rented property there was no issue with the landlord. End of the day it's adding to the property and they tend to be difficult to take with you :D

If you're going to be protecting it with acf50 as a matter of course then I really wouldn't bother with a lockup,if you can get an anchor in then it's outside your door and not hidden away where some scrote with a battery powered angle grinder can molest your pride and joy in relative undisturbed safety.

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The flat is upstairs, and although we have a courtyard to park in they are very funny about us doing anything. It's rented through a company, not a person.

No way is it staying outside Ed haha, I couldn't do it. :P The bike in question is my Dad's Bandit 12, he's owned it from new and it's mint and very low mileage, and I want to keep it mint.

Anyway, the garages went, and I won't be able to buy the bike for at least 3 months, so I'm just going to keep an eye out for local garages in that time I reckon.

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