I voted one/one: my townhouse has a tiny one-car garage, and my Honda Accord coupe just fits in it. If someone’s in the passenger seat I have to let them out in the driveway, because there isn’t enough room in the garage for both doors to be open wide enough. I store nothing in it, because nothing other than the car will fit. My neighbor has a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and never parks in her garage because she can’t. When I moved in I had a slightly smaller car than the Accord, and the day I brought the new car home I had a momentary “holy shit, is this thing gonna fit in the garage??” moment.
Same here! I’d never had a garage until I started renting this place, and I loooooove it. I haven’t scraped a window in three years, and whenever it snows or storms outside I love knowing that my car is “tucked in” and safe (from other cars, as you mentioned, and also from branches, etc.). I’m hoping to move closer to the city in the spring: I seriously doubt that I’ll be able to find/afford another place with a garage, and I’m going to miss the hell out of it.
Just put a plastic car cover over it in bad weather. Don’t do it every day or just for rain as moisture will build up and your a/c will start to smell musty. But for the occasional Ice/snow storm it’s fine. Just pull it off and most of the stuff comes with it. What doesn’t come off right away is not frozen to the car and slides off the first time you hit the brakes. At the most you’ll have a little frosty mist and need to run the defroster for a couple of minutes before you start. I have a big tarp - $7 at Walmart that works great for this.
We have a 3+ car garage, and put 2 cars in there. When the kids start to drive, we will see about getting a 3rd car in there as well. The + part is like another car space extending from the rest of the garage, but there is no garage door for it (just a window). I suppose it could be converted into another room for the house, but it holds all the outdoor gear.
When we moved into the house we could get all our possessions, including furniture heavy appliances, plus two cars, in there. Today, I do not think we could do it. I am always amazed at how much “stuff” we have accumulated, and even after getting rid of a lot of things.
We have a 2-car garage and 2 cars live in there. Our pickup is parked beside the garage. Since it’s a huge garage (something like 26X26) we also have space for a workbench, a lumber rack, several sets of shelves, a pressure washer, a generator, a tow-behind mulcher-vac that won’t fit in the shed with the mower, two garbage cans, recycling bins, and a ton of wood pellets for our stove.
When we bought this place, I insisted that at the very least, I would park in the garage. In every other place we’ve lived, the garage became a gigantic storage closet. Not any more.
Well, it’s not “WAY more work” than anything, because it’s just too easy. Floof the thing over the car, weigh it down with a brick or two and then lift the bricks and pull it back off the car. Snow/ice storms happen how many times per year?
In return for this occasional chore you get an entire extra room for your house! Now, if you already have ample closet and attic storage space, then perhaps it’s not a worthwhile trade. But for those of us who have very little other storage, this small effort 4-5 times per year is more than worthwhile.
I thought of this when buying my current car & it was mandatory that I be allowed to bring the car home & put it in the garage before purchase. This ended up ruling out a Subaru Outback. It fit in the garage, but was so tight that I couldn’t open the wagon door unless the garage door was open.
Not sure how many “spaces” exactly, but I got 5 cars in there now, and about a dozen motorcycles, a few work benchs, 5 sets of pallet rack for storage of various junk. I walled of the south 1/3 and made a workshop/mancave.
Bragging here… two spaces and three cars. I have a lift on one side of the garage so I get two cars in that spot. Its really a 2.5 car garage and I use the extra space for a work shop. Its also heated… radiant floor heating, and I have a 42" TV in there hooked up to a computer. I watch Netflix while I work on the cars.
But it’s not just for snow/ice storms: it’s for preventing overnight frost on the windows that needs to be scraped in the morning (which happens nearly every day during the winters here), and it’s for protecting my car during thunderstorms/high winds (which also happen often enough in my area), and it’s for letting me unload groceries on rainy days without getting soaked again (after having dried off on the drive home from the store).
It would be way more often than “4-5 times per year” for me…and that’s exactly what I have a garage for! I know what it’s like to have practically no storage, but I’ve always made it work. I simply can’t imagine not using my garage for my car if I had that option.