In a few weekends we will be hosting a few people for the weekend in our house. We have enough sleeping bags and couches that keeping them in the living area of the house isn’t an issue. But sleeping bags on a floor is a suboptimal arrangement.
How badly wrong would it be to park my car in the garage, leave the car windows and the interior door between the house and the garage open, and let two people sleep in the driver/passenger seats?
I’ve slept in the car outside before and know that it gets foggy as hell inside a car if you do that, hence, the rolling the windows down. The garage door isn’t well-sealed but generally if the house is 65 F and outside is 35 F the garage will be about 50 F.
My main concern is carbon monoxide from the furnace or water heater (marked in the picture). They are both natural gas. Is it possible that an unsafe concentration of CO could form in the garage that wouldn’t form in the living areas?
Unless they were faulty, I can’t see why there would be a problem with CO poisoning. After all, in my house, the furnace and water heater are inside (in the basement). Assuming they are vented that is (pipe to outside the house); I don’t know if this is only true when they are in the house as opposed to the garage.
I rent a house with several other people and for about 4 months last year we had a guy sleep in our garage. He was a friend and he was getting kicked out of the Navy soon and he needed a place to stay. He didn’t pay rent, but instead paid rent by cleaning the house, making drinks, and making snacks. It was completely worth it, mainly because his customer service was excellent.
We live in Hawaii so the temperature was always pretty decent and his cleaning was in lieu of about 600$ a month in rent.
I’d sure hate to be one of those people. Unless those seats recline to form a flat horizontal surface, it will be mighty hard to get a decent night’s sleep on them.
Yep I’m with you, I have slept in my car even with seats that recline many times and always wake up with a crook back. Although a mattress in the back with the rear seats down is damn comfy (Jeep Wrangler). But then again enough red wine and any place is comfy.
Yeah, get a cheap air mattress and put them in the garage if needed. Way better than a car. Get a small space heater too if you don’t have one. Pitch the idea to them that it will be like camping and make sure you have lots of nice heavy blankets/sleeping bags for them.
I actually think that would be kind of fun!
But other than that, I’d rather sleep on a hardwood floor in the house than in a car seat. Ugh.
If there are young kids (say, 10 or under) , it’s acceptable. Maybe even fun. (But you’ll have to convince them of that first, and hope they don’t whine when it gets cold or lonely out there.)
For adults…, not so much.
People are longer than car seats.
So you’re looking at a very uncomfortable night. But there’s another side to it: call it the psychological view. It just seems tacky, something a homeless person would do.
A sleeping bag on a carpetted floor in a house, is…well, at least it’s in the house, along with all the respectable folks. And you’ve got a flat spot to put your pillow on.
If you don’t have carpet, buy some fluffy shag rugs at Walmart, like students put in their dorm rooms. But an air mattress is an even better idea.
Yes, it is possible (but very unlikely), since furnace in a non-living space may not have been installed as carefully as if it was in a basement. The other issue is the car itself. Most cars constantly vent various volatile organic compounds that you really should not be breathing in. Two nights are fine, but long term is not. To be on the safe side, keep the garage door partially open for at least half an hour after you shut down the car engine.
You can get a carbon monoxide detector/alarm for under 20 bucks:
I would agree that an air mattress or even a sleeping bag on a mat (alos less than 20 bucks) would be much better than sleeping in the car. A few nights of that could really mess up someone’s back.
“Sleeping bags on a floor is a suboptimal arrangement” but asking your guests to sleep in the front seats of your car in the garage is supposed to be a step UP from that?
All issues of comfort aside, you’d be asking your houseguests to sleep in a very awkward and unconventional place while they are staying with you. Extremely odd…I would certainly be telling that story for awhile if I were one of the lucky visitors.
This is something you might be forced to do during, say, a natural disaster…not when you have friends in town for the weekend.
Alright alright everybody. I can pull off sleeping comfortably in my car but if 100% of the reaction here is negative then I’ll just find an air mattress.
Thanks Darth Panda. I always figured it was the kind of thing a house should have anyway but I assumed they would be more expensive than that.
I used to have a car that I could sleep comfortably in, stretched out across the front seat.
I’ve never had another that was any good for sleeping since I replaced that 20-year-old beast back in the early 90s.
So if your car is a early 70s or older land yacht with bench seats, I think it’s a grand idea.
Otherwise, I’d rather sleep on the floor. A couple of extra quilts or sleeping bags for some padding would be fine, thanks. An air mattress would be great.