Vacation Rental Storage Essentials. What’s in Your Closet?

I find it essential to have two locked vacation rental storage areas in my property – one for a stock of cleaning supplies and simple maintenance equipment and another for my family’s vacation stuff and personal belongings.

Lockable vacation rental storage

In an ideal world I’d have two cleaning and maintenance closets for my vacation rental storage. The first a cleaner’s closet, lockable to store supplies of guest toiletries and cleaning/maintenance products and the other, accessible to guests, holding cleaning products and equipment to encourage them to keep the place clean! The other is what we might call the owner’s closet. When it comes to my family’s personal stuff – it provides vacation rental storage for a collection of raingear, wetsuits, surfboards, sports equipment and assorted beach stuff – we have a large lockable roof space in our rental. A smaller lockable closet holds our bed linen, pillows, toiletries and other vacation essentials. Keeping it onsite means we can just take off with minimal packing when we choose to visit. If you do leave any valuable personal equipment that you don’t want guests to use, make sure you keep it in a secure vacation rental storage area, under lock and key. In my experience, unless you do so and however carefully you hide your things away, your guests – or more likely, their curious children – will find it.

Make an inventory

If you live any distance from your rental, you’ll need to organise an inventory of items for the cleaner to use and a way to replenish the stock. Buying in bulk is best if you want to keep costs down and that’ll mean you need more vacation rental storage for your cleaner’s closet. Depending on the relationship you have with the cleaner, you could arrange for him or her to replenish as necessary from a pre-approved list of products from a local supplier who would invoice you direct.

Bed linen storage

If you decide to provide bed linen, pillows and towels, whether you charge for these or not, remember that you’ll need somewhere to store clean stock and some arrangement for having used linen cleaned, ironed and returned to the property. Your cleaner may take this on for you as a paid extra, or there may be a local linen service if your property is in a busy resort. Either way, the arrangements for bed linen are a vital consideration for the comfort of your guests as well as being a potentially costly item. It’s worth taking time to set up to ensure that it all runs smoothly. When it comes to basic maintenance equipment such as gardening tools, lawnmowers, power tools and the like, these too are best kept in secure vacation rental storage to avoid accidents for which you may be liable.