Storage Problems. Again.

I’ve made no secret of my strategy that the legs of the tripod of my ability to own 13 cars are a wonderful understanding and tolerant spouse, affordable insurance through Hagerty, and affordable storage. Regarding the storage leg, I’ve written pieces about how I progressed from having access to the two-car garage at my mother’s house … to moving to Newton (Massachusetts) to a property with a rusty corrugated metal one-car garage, to building a three-and-sort-of-four-car garage … to leeching off the fact that for years my engineering job had me working in a cavernous warehouse where I could stash cars … to renting five affordable, individual 24-hour access roll-up garage bays … to losing those and thinking that the solution was to sell our house in the suburbs and move to a car-centric property … to accepting that that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon … and, finally, finding other affordable storage in a giant but somewhat odd warehouse 70 miles away in the town of Monson on the Massachusetts/Connecticut line.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Monson warehouse arrangement. On the positive side, it’s cheap—$70/month per car—and expandable. If I happened into another car I couldn’t pass up, I’d have somewhere to put it. But the downsides are significant. It’s far less convenient than having individual garages with my roll-up doors. And once I’m inside, I sometimes find my cars are blocked in, and I have to find someone who works there to move the offending vehicle (it’s not a dedicated car storage facility). Plus, the landlord rents over-winter storage to RV, trailer, and boat owners, so once the big boys roll in, my cars aren’t going anywhere until spring. Additionally, traffic on the Mass Pike (I-90) has stepped up considerably in recent years, so the drive that Google Maps says should take a bit over an hour is rarely accomplished in less than 90 minutes; it can be two hours if I get caught on a leaf-peeping or college move-in weekend.

Still, $350/month to store five cars is dirt cheap—less than half what I’ve found anywhere else—and the hour-and-a-half-ish drive time is sort of workable, so I continue to go with the devil I’ve come to know.

But now there’s a new factor.

Mold.

It was a very wet summer here in Boston, with drenching rain causing catastrophic flooding in parts of central Massachusetts and Vermont. One of the times I was out in Monson, I found that one of my cars—which are parked in two rows near one of the warehouse walls—was being directly dripped on. I looked up and saw where the leak was causing insulation to pull away from the ceiling. I moved the car one space forward to get it out from both the drip and the potential dropping of insulation, but I didn’t really think too much of it. Big old metal buildings like this often leak. The storage cost is cheap. You get what you pay for.

But when I went out there a few weeks ago to swap cars, there were numerous puddles of standing water inside the warehouse, including one spreading under several of my cars. When I pulled the cover off the car I wanted to drive, I was greeted by a substantial bloom of mold on the seats and steering wheel. Concerned, I uncovered and examined all five cars.

All of the cars had some degree of mold, ranging from near-trivial to no no no no NO! I realized that, on some of the cars, I’d left the windows cracked open, and I found that the correlation was pretty clear—the car with the smallest amount of mold was the furthest from the water and had been left with the windows all the way up. The moldiest car—my ’74 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special—was sitting in a puddle with the windows rolled partially down (it gets a little mousey-smelling inside the Lotus if you leave it with the windows up).

For years, I’ve left a 10-ounce refillable DampRid moisture-absorbing container on the floor of each stored car. These containers have a plastic sink-strainer-like basket that sits in the top. You pour the humidity-absorbent white flakey DampRid crystals into the basket. As the crystals get saturated with water, it drains through the basket into the bottom of the container. As I moved from car to car and emptied the water out of each container, I realized that all of the crystals were gone. In other words, I’d gone too long without visiting the cars and refilling the DampRid containers with fresh desiccant, and the amount of humidity from the rainy summer, the leaky roof, and the water on the floor had overwhelmed them and used them up. So of course the cars were moldy.

I had other constraints on my time and wasn’t able to spend the entire day dealing with the issue, so I did what was efficient and possible. First, there are no assigned marked spaces in the warehouse, so I pulled the cars that were sitting in water one row forward. Next, I keep a gallon of DampRid crystals in the trunk of one of the cars in Monson that I use to refill the containers, but I had nothing to clean the mold with. So I drove to a local hardware store, bought some cleaning wipes, refilled the containers, and wiped off most of the mold. On one of my 2002s, the mold had only bloomed on the hard surfaces of the steering wheel and center console, but on others it had settled onto the rugs. My Bavaria had visible rust blooms on the floor. Fortunately, both the aftermarket Coco mats, as well as the original snap-in floor carpet pieces, were easily removable, so I took them with me for cleaning.

My ’79 Euro 635CSi, however, had a large ugly rust bloom on the passenger-side rug, and it’s a newer-style one-piece rug that can’t be removed without disassembling much of the interior of the car. I wiped the mold off with the cleaning wipes and resolved to come back soon and do a more complete job.

When I got home with the Bavaria’s removable mats and rug pieces, it was easy enough to blast the mold off with a pressure washer and leave them to dry in the sun, but the Monson mold event jarred me. I joke that I don’t consider myself a “collector” because a) I don’t chase investment by buying the most expensive cars in the best condition possible, and b) I sure as hell don’t have climate-controlled storage. But seeing my cars coated in mold in leaky storage was enough to make me think that I’d crossed the line from quirky automotive accumulator to negligent hoarder. I again began pounding on Zillow and doing a deep dive into looking for car-centric properties, but I stopped, as my wife and I never fully agreed on where we would move, and so we’ve stayed put where we are just west of Boston. And that’s OK. Part of my secret to happiness is not craving things I can’t have—don’t ask me about Italian exotics or what some ridiculously mint low-mileage car went for on Bring a Trailer; I pay zero attention.

About a week later, I returned to the Monson warehouse with a second set of five DampRid cannisters and some mold treat/block spray. My plan was to double up on the moisture-absorbing capacity present in each car and spend the better part of the day cleaning them and driving each one to get some fresh air inside. When I got there, I found that two things had changed. First, the puddles had largely dried up. Second, when I checked the existing DampRid in each car, I found that unlike the previous week where the crystals were gone and the canisters had only water in them, this time there was a crust on the DampRid, but no water. More important, I didn’t see any new mold. In other words, with less humidity and ample desiccant, the mold was kept at bay.

Nonetheless, I followed through with the plan. I went through each car one by one. I used the mold cleaner/blocker spray as per the directions—spray it on and wipe off any existing mold. I took each car for a glorious windows-down 30-ish-minute autumn drive, which obviously was not exactly hardship. When I returned to the warehouse, I sprayed the mold cleaner/blocker again to lay down a protective layer. I paid particular attention to spraying all the rug surfaces.

But during all the uncovering-covering action, I noticed something else. One of the covers had evidence of a brown tarry substance dripping on it. I looked up and could see drips of it forming on the undersides of the insulation batting hanging from the metal roof. It was everywhere, but it was worse at the edge of the roof near where it had been leaking.

I took two actions. The car with the goo on the cover was the last one that I had parked near the warehouse wall, so I moved it forward. Next, I noticed that many of the other cars in the warehouse had disposable clear plastic covers over them. I always regarded these as a poor substitute for a real indoor cover, but I suddenly understood their utility in helping prevent anything that might drip from the roof from getting through a porous cover and onto the paint. When I got home, I jumped on Amazon and found dozens of choices. I selected the pack that had five covers for $35. The next time I’m out in Monson, I’ll lay them on.

So, I’ve walked myself back from the ledge. I’m not a negligent hoarder. The mold was mostly due to the biblically wet summer, proximity to standing water, and my leaving the cars for too long without changing the desiccant. The simple measures of moving the cars forward, doubling-up on the DampRid, buying a $7 plastic cover for each car, and a commitment to a once-a-month trip to Monson to check on the cars should get me through ’til spring, at which time I can re-evaluate the whole thing again.

After all, this property is waiting for me in western Massachusetts:

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

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