Storing furniture in unheated buildings
Joesawdust
| Posted in General Discussion on
My family will be moving from a large home in Oregon to a somewhat smaller home in Wyoming. Bottom line is that some nice antiques and custom made furniture will not fit in the new home. However, we do not want to sell these items and would prefer to store them for up to 3 or 4 years. Perhaps by then our children will be ready to use these pieces. Temperatures in this part of Wyoming range from 95 in the summer to minus 40 in the winter. Will these very low temperatures damage the furniture if it is kept dry? Or, is some type of heated storage facility required? I’ll appreciate any advice on this problem. THANKS, Joe
Replies
Joe, you've got a problem. The issue isn't so much the temperature extremes the furniture will experience in the Wyoming environment, but rather the shift in humidity. The Pacific Northwest is one of the most humid climates in the country and most of Wyoming is very arid. As far as the furniture experiencing repeated broad shifts in temperature over several years, I suspect the greater risk is that most of the damage will occur in the first few months...as the furniture is exposed to the first cycle of severe desiccation.
If these are truly valuable antiques, or even if they are only valuable for sentimental reasons, your objective should be to keep them in a humidity controlled environment. It needn't be kept comfortably warm, but you do have to stabilize the humidity.
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