I'm in the same boat as you are. All of my new appliances have been delivered are in the dining room and have been for months. They will be there until June or so as kitchen reno goes on and on. . .

After inspecting them upon delivery, I just repackaged them in the original shipping packaging. Nothing fancy.

For pallets try the big box home improvement stores, they throw out some every day.

thanks Doc! great idea about checking with the big box stores.

Dining room. Be sure to inspect AND test everything!

How do you test a rangetop or a wall oven before it's installed? A refrigerator takes a standard plug and is easy to check but the other things require a 240V plug or gas hookup to work. Kinda hard to test them until they are installed.

It would be better if you could get some kind of note on your receipt that the goods are to be stored, initial inspection to be in X months. Not sure your seller could do that, but it would be better than having to repackage everything. The shipping cartons are the best protection and you are more likely to scratch something if you have it out of the box monkeying with it in your garage.

I suppose there is no perfect solution and every option has risks, but I am sorta confident in my ability to judge things just by looking for damage to the cardboard. I would definitely open and inspect everything that arrived with any apparent damage to the carton, but if they showed up pristine, I would just leave them in the boxes, set them up on palates and not worry about them.

Anyway, every appliance made is designed to be warehoused for awhile. If you trust your seller to make good on any concealed damage or defects, I'd just put them on pallets, secure anything that was 'tippy" on the pallet with cargo straps, and leave them out there.

The boxes will keep the spiders out for the most part. Aside from water, vermin of the rodent sort are probably your biggest worry during storage. Keep the fridge upright and pay attention to "do not stack" warnings on the cartons. Other than that, I wouldn't worry too much.

I actually did test my wall oven before it was installed by temporarily wiring it to the 240v circuit. It's not that hard, but keep the wall oven ontop the shipping pallet so you can wheel it around on a hand truck to test and put it back out of the way.

I was using my new built-in microwave for 2 months just sitting on a wire shelving unit. And guess what? It FAILED within that time and I had to get it repaired! Good thing I was using it during the warantee period.

The manufacturer will NOT give you any sympathy for a warrantee request even if you claim it wasn't installed until X date. They will stick to the purchase date. Trust me, I asked.

Electronics will typically fail within a short period of time after you start using if it is prone to a failure or has a marginal component. That's why many manufacturers perform a "burn-in" test before shipping the product to the reseller (basically just a stress test over some period of time).