There’s a guy in Bophut who used to be a customer of mine. Came in last November with a Tesco bag full of what used to be his father’s leather briefcase, the family photos he’d been keeping for thirty years, and a couple of paperbacks. Wet season got the lot. He’d locked the villa up in May and not thought about it again until he came back in October.

He was in tears in the office. I wasn’t really set up for that, half nine in the morning, halfway through a coffee, and there’s nothing useful you can do once the damage is done. Mould comes through leather within a couple of months and once it’s there, you’re not getting it out. The photos had fused into one solid block. The paperbacks had pulped. He took the briefcase to a leather place off Sukhumvit a couple of weeks later and they told him exactly what I’d told him.

That’s the conversation I have every single November. Always with someone who didn’t think it’d happen to them. The villa had a roof, the cupboard had a door, what could go wrong. What goes wrong is the air inside your house on this island is the air outside. 80, 85, sometimes 90 percent humidity for six straight months. Aircon helps in rooms you’re using, but the minute you fly home for a fortnight, the house reverts back. Most people don’t think about that until something they care about is gone.

The Bophut guy wasn’t the only one that year. Same wet season I had a Russian customer in Lamai who’d left his electronics in a study with the aircon off because the room was closed and he was paying for the electricity. Two laptops, a desktop, an external drive with about fifteen years of family photos and his entire freelance portfolio on it. Drive started clicking in October. He spent 80,000 baht at a data recovery place in Bangkok and got maybe a third of the photos back. Portfolio was gone. There was also a British couple in Choeng Mon, both teachers, who’d asked their landlord whether the spare room was sealed enough to leave good furniture in over the wet season. He said yes, of course, no problem. He was being polite, not technical. They came back to a leather sofa that had to be skipped and a credenza with the veneer hanging off in strips.

And then a woman in Plai Laem who’d called me in early April that same year. We talked for twenty minutes. She booked a small unit, brought over the leather, the photos, two laptops, a hard drive, and a box of paperwork. Came back in November. Picked everything up. Nothing was damaged. Total cost was less than what she’d have spent replacing one of the laptops, never mind the photos.

The thing I still think about with the Bophut guy is what his wife said. She told him the house didn’t feel like theirs anymore once the photos were gone. They sold up two years later and moved to a smaller place in Hua Hin. She couldn’t stay on Samui after that wet season. The whole thing was preventable for the price of a mini unit and a phone call.

What I Tell People Now in April

If you live in a properly sealed Chaweng condo with constant aircon and you’re actually there using it through the wet season, don’t bother with storage. You’re fine. Same if your place is small and you’ve already pared down to almost nothing.

If you’re in one of the open-style villas around Maenam, Choeng Mon or Lamai, or you’re a snowbird locking up for six months, or you’re in the middle of a renovation that’s running late, then move the leather, move the photos and any documents you’d struggle to replace, move the off-season clothes, move the backup hard drive with the kids’ photos on it. Move anything you’d genuinely be upset to lose. Leave the kitchen stuff, the towels, the bedding, the things you use and wash every week. The wet season eats what sits, not what you handle.

And if it’s only a few items, don’t take a full unit. A mini unit with a couple of dehumidifier sachets does the same job for less. People often look surprised when I tell them that, like they were expecting me to upsell them. If a small unit works, a small unit works.

Look, I’ve been doing this on the island since 2009 and the November conversation always plays out the same. The people who got a phone call out of someone in March or April don’t have anything to bring in. The people who didn’t have something they wished they hadn’t lost. Our Samui storage is open, the kettle’s on most mornings, come and have a chat before the rains start. Or after, if you’d rather. I’ll still be here either way.