Your Kingston lease ends April 30th. You're flying home or moving to a summer internship city. You have a full apartment's worth of furniture, kitchen supplies, and accumulated belongings that don't fit in your car and aren't worth shipping. This is the summer storage problem that catches most first and second-year students off guard.
Here's every option, honestly assessed.
Option 1: Sublet Your Apartment (Keep Your Stuff In Place)
The cleanest solution: find a subletter who takes over your apartment for May-August. Your stuff stays exactly where it is, you're not paying rent on an empty apartment, and you collect subletting income that partially or fully covers your lease obligations.
The process: your landlord needs to consent to the sublet (Ontario law requires this). Post your sublet on Fliku and in Queen's Facebook groups in March — students looking for summer housing start searching early. Set the sublet price at or slightly below your rent to make it competitive.
The risk: you're responsible for any damage the subletter causes. Document your apartment thoroughly before they move in — photos of every room, every wall, every piece of furniture.
Option 2: Store With a Friend Who Stays in Kingston
If you have a friend staying in Kingston for the summer (some students do work terms, research positions, or simply choose to stay), storing boxes in their basement or spare room costs you nothing except the social debt. This is the default solution for students with the right social connections.
Be specific about what you're storing and for how long. "A few boxes" that turns into "my entire bedroom" strains friendships. Get explicit agreement on volume and pickup date.
Option 3: Commercial Storage in Kingston
Kingston has several self-storage facilities:
- Storage Plus (Bath Road area): Standard self-storage units, 5x5 to 10x20 feet. A 5x5 unit (fits a few boxes and small furniture) runs $60-80/month. A 5x10 (fits a bedroom's worth) runs $90-130/month.
- U-Haul Storage (Montreal Street): Attached to the truck rental location, convenient if you're renting a truck anyway. Similar pricing.
- Public Storage locations: Multiple in Kingston; compare online pricing before booking — the same unit size varies by $20-30/month between facilities.
Four months of a 5x5 unit runs $240-320 total. Compare this to the cost of replacing items you'd otherwise abandon — sometimes storage is the right financial call, sometimes it's not.
Option 4: Sell Before You Leave, Buy Again in September
The counterintuitive approach: sell your bulkier used items on Fliku before April 30th, and buy used replacements in August when incoming students' demand creates good supply. This works especially well for:
- IKEA furniture that's depreciated significantly and will depreciate further
- Kitchen appliances you could replace cheaply
- Lamps, rugs, and soft furnishings
It doesn't work for items with sentimental value or high-quality pieces you'd lose money selling and more money replacing. Applies mainly to cheap IKEA-grade furniture.
Option 5: Donate or Give Away What You Don't Need
The honest audit before storage: what do you actually want to see again in September? Anything you're ambivalent about should be donated to Value Village, listed as free on Fliku, or left on the curb during move-out week (it will be gone within hours).
Moving costs and storage costs have a way of exceeding the replacement value of the items you're spending them on. Be ruthless about what's worth keeping.
What to Actually Pay for Storage
The math: if storing something costs more than replacing it in September, don't store it. A $40 IKEA shelf stored for 4 months at $20/month (your proportional share of a storage unit) costs $80 to store. You can replace it for $40. Donate it.
The things worth paying to store: quality mattresses, expensive electronics, good furniture, items with genuine sentimental value, kitchen equipment you specifically chose. Everything else is worth reconsidering.
What do Queen's students do with their stuff in summer?
The most common approaches: sublet the apartment (stuff stays in place), store with a friend staying in Kingston, use commercial storage for the essentials, or sell large furniture before leaving and replace in fall. Most students use a combination — sublet if possible, otherwise a small storage unit for the things actually worth keeping.
How much does student storage cost in Kingston for summer?
A 5x5 self-storage unit (fits a dorm room's worth) runs $60-80/month in Kingston. Four months (May-August) is $240-320 total. A 5x10 unit runs $90-130/month ($360-520 for summer). Compare this to the resale value of what you're storing to decide if it makes sense.
