Car Storage Options THE LOCAL HACK WEIGHS IN WORDS + PHOTOS: ROB SIEGEL
Summer may seem like an odd time to talk about car storage. After all, if you have a treasured car and a place for it to over-winter, you probably just pulled it out of storage. But in my case, it’s precisely because of that that the storage issue was once again on my mind. These ideas may be helpful in the fall if you’re looking for storage options. There aren’t many absolutes in the vintage car world—as I wrote a few months ago, there’s no wrong way to enjoy a vintage car—but one of them is that rust-prone cars must be kept dry. If they’re not, the rust simply explodes all over the car. Leaving any 40- or 50-year-old car at the mercy of the elements is proof that you really don’t care about it. Doing so risks a visit by the black helicopters operated by The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vintage Cars (trust me, they’re real). As those of us who live in suburban Boston know, storage is problematic. It’s hard enough to find a house in the ‘burbs with a two-car garage. If you do, frequently the garage is occupied by your and your spouse’s daily drivers, leaving a pampered classic with nowhere to hibernate. Indoor car storage options can be either private or commercial. Private options include portions of garages, whole private garage bays, barns, and privately-owned warehouses. Commercial options include storage units, public parking garages with monthly rental packages, and boutique enthusiast warehouses. What you get depends on how you want to work the tradeoff between cost, distance, access, privacy, and security. Let’s start with the private options. In a perfect world, you’d have a friendly neighbor two doors down with an unused garage bay who just wants car-parts money for it. That’s pretty rare. And, of course, highly unrealistic, as if he or she just wanted car-parts money, the bay would be filled with a project car. In years past, I used Craigslist to search for garage storage. It revealed that affordable storage close to the city or in the affluent suburbs consists mostly of half of someone’s two-car garage. Forget working on the car there. Forget even visiting it. The landlords typically want the car in after Thanksgiving and out around Memorial Day. And, for this, they ask $250 to $400 a month. But the further out from Boston I looked, the more affordable spaces I found with the far-preferable configuration of providing you the key to an individual roll-up garage door. About ten years ago, I began renting 32
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