Space is a premium in land scarce Singapore and even more so in newer homes where the total floor area have shrunk over the years.
No matter what form of accommodation we have – apartment, house or flat, all families run out of space very quickly and having that extra bit of space is always a welcomed luxury.
For families with young children, it’s a struggle each and every year to create space especially since our eldest have entered formal schooling. We needed to create space for a proper study desk, for shelves to store her books, stationeries and, of course, space to play. The need for more space became more acute with the addition of a lively toddler in the household. We needed space for him to crawl, run, tumble around and space to store those bulky toys after they have been outgrown. I believe parents with young kids would totally identify with us.
How about space for ourselves? Let’s not even get into that.
In the bid to create space, sometimes we struggle to decide what to do with items that may not have any current functional use but certainly have sentimental value. These range from our children’s art pieces, infant clothes, books and toys from special relatives/friends, cards, mementos from trips, old photos (wedding and honeymoon photos included) etc… Throwing or giving some of these items away seem such a heartache as these items are tied to deep, strong sentiments.
What profound joy it would be, for instance, if we could show our children the clothes they used to wear or toys that they used to play so that if God permits, we can hand these down to our grandchildren!
Then there are also bulky items which we need only on seasonal basis such as cold wear (for winter holidays) and festive decorations (e.g. Christmas Tree). These inevitably take up quite a bit of our living space. During our recent move in Nov 15, we revisited that hard struggle again.
Thankfully we discovered Spaceship.
What is Spaceship?
Spaceship is a local Singaporean tech startup. A full service valet storage company which aims to make customers’ lives easier by offering one-stop, easy storage solutions. So far they’ve stored NSmen’s barang barang, students’ stuff over the summer vacation, helped make people’s homes more awesome by keeping the non-essentials out of sight and help power small business’ logistics operations.
How is Spaceship different from other Storage Facilities?
Spaceship‘s online website allows customers to manage inventory easily. Pictures and names can be added to boxes, complete with lists of everything that’s inside — right down to the item categories and brands – so that we can remember (and retrieve with ease) what we have stored!
When we want the items, Spaceship will deliver them back to us (at a fee). Customers can also retrieve stored items from the warehouse directly with advanced notice.
What can we store at Spaceship?
Customers can store pretty much anything with Spaceship (except for illegal stuff , living things, edibles, perishable items, hazardous materials, liquids or anything flammable).
How does Spaceship work?
1. Free transportation of water and dust resistant storage boxes to customer’s homes (or offices) and picking the boxes up within a specific number of days. In this case – 14 days.
2. Once the boxes are packed, the transport team will label, seal and transport them back into Spaceship‘s secured warehouse for storage (insurance included).
3. All the items and boxes are digitally inventorized. From a single dashboard, customers can see and manage all items in storage. Retrieve by the item/box or get everything sent back from a click of a button.
How big are Spaceship‘s boxes?
Spaceship’s standard boxes can fit 15 pairs of shoes or 50 story books or 30 shirts or 10 sweaters. Their storeroom plan fits half a bedroom worth of stuff. Their bomb shelter plan fits one bedroom worth of stuff. Their apartment plan fits two bedrooms worth of stuff. Don’t know how many boxes you need? Order more, they only charge for the ones we use.
Spaceship can also store a range of odd-shaped items (e.g. bicycles, furniture, luggage, golf bags etc). Customers may request for a quote on special/bulky items.
How much does it cost?
Customers are charged by the number of boxes they occupy, on a monthly usage based on a transparent and straightforward flat-rate.
| Standard Box | $9/month |
| Odd Sized Item | $14/month |
| Store Room | $90/month |
All items are stored by the standard box or individually in a secure warehouse. Bin drop-off and collection is free, but customers must pay to have bins returned to our homes (or offices).
| Drop Off of Empty Boxes | FREE |
| Collection of Filled Boxes & Odd-sized Items | FREE |
| Return of Stored Items to Customers | $20/trip |
| Collection of Empty Boxes | FREE! |
Check out our Pricing page for a comprehensive table of transport pricing.
Not at all. You can store for as little as 1 day to ∞ (as long as you wish).
Are my items safe with Spaceship?
Spaceship makes the security of customers’ boxes their highest priority. They’ve got cameras, alarms and 24-hour security at their warehouse. One big assurance is that all stuff stored are insured (up to $1,000 against fire and theft).
Our experience with Spaceship
We couldn’t be more pleased with the convenience Spaceship offers. Without stepping out of our home, we were able to offload these items to the Spaceship warehouse:
1. Married to a photographer-buff husband, we have many photo albums full of cherished memories from our overseas holidays, our ROM, our Wedding Day and even our own childhood photos. All these went into Spaceship for storage in their climate-controlled warehouse.
2. Dana was our only child for 6 years and we’ve sent some of her favourite artwork from Nursery to Kindy to Spaceship for storage too. Just can’t bear to discard them…
3. Soft-toys that carry some special significance. From left: Dana’s 1st LeapFrog Talking Pet – Violet; Dana’s first Carebear; Angie’s Classic Winnie The Pooh given by David and many more not seen in this photo.
4. Costumes and uniforms which commemorate Dana’s early milestones. For example, graduation concert costume, Kindy costume, childcare costume, school hat etc…and I don’t think we are the only sentimental parents around.
5. Boxes and boxes of books, cards and letters which hold special meanings, too fond to dispose.
We were also happy that Spaceship welcomes odd-sized items that do not fit into their standard boxes. We stored Dana’s tricycle, travel stroller plus several Ikea boxes of Lego toys (for until a time when Buddy is ready to play with them). We also stored a framed hand-drawn portrait of me drawn by my student, a Birthday poster (which has frayed due to being squashed in our tiny storeroom), a set of family canvas prints (which are now obsolete as Buddy was not in it), a teak bench (from our 1st matrimonial home), a rattan chair (which we used for studio photography) and two large luggage of Winter wear.
The transparent monthly charge (with no admin fee, no security deposits and no hidden fees) meant anyone could store as many items as they want, as long as it fit into the number of boxes they are willing to pay or in our case, an entire store room!
With Chinese New Year round the corner, many families would be spring-cleaning. If you too are in our predicament of needing more space for your family, no harm setting aside those items which you do not require on a daily basis to Spaceship!
I am not a hoarder (in fact, we’ve donated more items than we’ve stored to Salvation Army). This is our 1st time using such a storage service and we found it so liberating to come back to a clutter-free home, having the assurance that when the need arises, we can always have an item we’ve stored back at our side, with just a mouse click away.
SPECIAL READER PROMO!
Quote ‘Life’sTinyMiracles‘ to receive a special, one-off SGD20 Credit to try out Spaceship’s services! You can do this via phone or online when requesting for a quote. Just remember to type our blog’s name in the remarks column and let the good people at Spaceship know you got to hear of their services through us.
How timely. We are moving temporarily in 2 months time and are wondering where we can put some of our stuff! Even asking the grandpas if they can adopt out furniture for 2 years. Answer was “no space”. We will look into this option for sure!
Very timely, CNY is round the corner and it is time for spring cleaning. Argh!
Wow! you guys certainly kept a lot of Dana’s childhood memories 🙂
cheers, Andy
(SengkangBabies)
You may not be a hoarder but I certainly am one! 😛 We store a lot of our extras at my MIL’s place.. this is a good option for us to KIV too. I definitely want to pass on a lot of things to Lil Pumpkin and her kids in the future!
Ai @ Sakura Haruka
Love how clean and secured this service look. Will definitely use spaceship if we need additional storage space.
Oh, I think this would come in handy for our family because we are going to relocate at the end of 2016… I need all the space for storing all the knick-knacks since we are moving out of a maisonette to a condominium (yes, space is a concern indeed).