It’s seems only right that the first post on our newly named blog ‘Fruix Storey’ tells the story of how Fruix Storage began.
Fruix Farm has been in the Turnbull family since 1953, Andrew and I moved here when we got married in 1996. Andrew took over the farm from his Dad and started a contracting service and I opened the house up for Bed and Breakfast inbetween bringing up our children and looking after my fledgling flock of sheep.
The 100 acres of land here is good so we have always grown cereals and potatoes but we stopped growing tatties in 1997 and started to find farming challenging when the prices for barley and wheat plummeted in the late nineties. The lowest price we received for Spring Barley was in 2001 when we sold it for feed at £62. It cost us more than that to grow it.
It was becoming clear that we needed to diversify and looked into developing the old part of the steading into holiday cottages or craft units but we were very unsure about how popular it would be and the experience from the B&B had demonstrated that the tourist season in Kinross-shire is very short.
One Sunday morning we got a lucky break when a friend asked if we’d let them a building to store their business equipment. We said yes and it didn’t take too long to empty the bottom barn and spruce it up for the new tenants moving in. We quickly found we enjoyed having new people here so started to think how we could develop more storage space.
We started with the rest of the old barn replacing the roof, installing new windows and doors and converting the shed at the rear into a 1200 sq ft unit with a sliding door. The stores were popular and by 2004 we had four tenants renting the space. As more businesses heard about our convenient location next to junction 5 of the M90, just south of Kinross we started to receive more and more enquiries.
The next two stages of the expansion were supported by Scottish Rural Development Funding and saw us erect new portal framed sheds sub-divided into units of between 800 – 2400 sq ft and we also built the first six of our 21 garages. By this point we started receiving enquiries about self-storage from customers looking to put their household contents into storage between moves or when they moved abroad. Andrew sourced a number of single use containers and with over 50 now on site the containers offer the perfect solution for both personal and business storage.
Farming continues here around and in-between the self storage. Andrew has however reduced his contracting commitments so he is on-site to meet more customers and whilst I now have a much bigger flock of sheep to look after having taken over the reins at Bankhead from my Dad when he retired, I also work part-time here helping with the invoices and website.
2018 is an exciting year for us as we look forward to opening up the new part of Fruix Storage which will offer purpose built self-storage rooms, we’ll keep you up to date through our blog and on social media.
Fiona