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 a garage in Fitchburg. It wasn’t in a great part of town, and the space was cramped and had no electricity for a trickle charger, but at $50/month, I was thrilled to have it. It was one of five adjacent garage bays, and I told the owner that as soon as the others became available, I’d rent them. We developed a relationship, he gave me the right of first refusal when garages came up for rental, and eventually, I rented all five. The price eventually went up to $75/month, but still, $375/month for five garage spaces was dirt cheap.

These days, there are tools other than Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace to find space. The dream of finding a “neighbor” with extra garage space has the website neighbor.com attempting to be the Airbnb for personallyrented storage. You enter your address, select “vehicle storage,” select the size, and select spaces that are “indoor.” It showed me 15 places within 50 as-the-crowflies miles of my house in Newton for between $120 and $350/month. Not bad. You can sort by price or distance (obviously the ones closest to Boston are pricier), and click on each offering and see what access restrictions there are. Some say “appointment required for each visit,” some don’t. Be aware that some entries are mislabeled—a too-good-to-be-true garage price may turn out to be an outdoor parking space.

Part of the appeal of oddball, personally-rented garage spaces is that the warts-and-all nature can make them affordable. In addition, their leases are typically less formal than those of commercial rentals. They may even be little more than a handshake agreement with a confirming email. This may be fine for storing an inexpensive car, but if you’ve got a six-figure classic, both you and the landlord may want the liability issues formalized. If you’re looking for storage space for multiple cars, you’re not likely to find something in someone’s backyard. There are certainly unused barns in New England, but unless they’ve been renovated and have a cement floor, barns are generally terrible places for cars—too much dust, too many rodents, and poor security. However, if you’re lucky, you may stumble upon some oddball arrangement such as an owner who built a big metal building on his property and is offsetting the cost by renting out space.

When you cross over into commercially rented storage space, you enter a world of formal, multipage contracts that clearly spell out the do’s, don’ts, and liability issues. Some storage venues require the car to be registered and insured at all times. It’s likely that there’ll be a clause releasing the company from responsibility and indemnifying them from any loss, liability, theft, damage, or cost that may arise from storage.

Walking up the ladder of commercial storage, the first rung is renting space from a general storage company. There are many (U-Haul, Life Storage, CubeSmart), but Extra Space Storage has exploded in Massachusetts over the past ten years. Their website allows you to select drive-up enclosed vehicle storage (as opposed to parking lot RV storage or indoor non-vehicle-accessible cubes). Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to show you a list of which locations have these available; you need to drill down into each one to find out. By doing so, I found several inside I-495 for around $200, though that may have been a 35% off Memorial Day special. If you need space and one of these units is nearby, this is a good option, as you have an individual rollup door, 24-hour access via a key code for a locked gate, as well as 24-hour security. The downside is that you probably can’t use a trickle charger.

If you’re looking for something right in the city, the least-expensive option might be something that doesn’t exist at all in the private realm—a monthly pass in a public parking garage. The public nature would make this far less than optimal for an expensive beloved classic that everyone else in the garage is going to rubberneck, but at least the car is out of the elements. A quick search with spotangels.com shows available covered spaces in downtown Boston garages in the $350-$600/month range.

The best-known commercial option is shared warehouse storage. This is a restrictedaccess space for which you need to make an appointment to pull your own car in and out. At the low end is less-expensive storage where the warehouse is unimproved industrial property. Higher-end storage is usually part of a boutique enthusiast car enterprise— you know, Ferrari banners and Le Mans posters hanging on the walls—that also offers repairs, detailing, and other services. Trickle-charging is generally welcomed. Some offer different prices depending on the ease of access. For example, Silverstone Motor Cars has a rate structure that differentiates parking your car in an aisle for drop-in access during business hours ($275/ mo) versus having the car be one of a bunch of sardines in a can requiring a two-day notice ($235/mo). The Toy Box offers over-winterbut-it-stays-the-whole-winter for $175/month, platinum storage with once-a-week access for $350/mo, and options in between. There’s also classiccarvault.com and garagefortytwo.com, both of which show photos of rows of high-end collectibles and list “concierge services” such as delivering your freshly detailed car to you at your house, but neither of which list its prices.

Now that I’ve laid it out academically, let me circle back to my own personal experience. The downsides of the five spaces I rented in Fitchburg were more than mitigated by their low cost, and the 50-minute drive from my house in Newton was perfect—I enormously enjoyed tooling out there on a Sunday morning and swapping one cool vintage car for another (what I called “doing The Fitchburg Swap”). When the Fitchburg house where the garages were hosted got sold, I found a guy on Facebook Marketplace who owns an enormous warehouse out in Monson, MA, and rents car spaces for the unbelievably low rate of $70/mo. There are, however, several catches. The warehouse is industrial space for his irrigation company, so there’s heavy equipment everywhere. Over the winter, the space is rented mostly to RVs, trailers, and boats, so once your car is blocked in, it’s not going anywhere. There’s no electricity for trickle-charging. The cars routinely get rolled around for warehouse business, so part of the deal means leaving them unlocked with the keys in them. And getting a car out is less formal than making an appointment. Sometimes it’s seamless, sometimes it takes hours. Doing “The Monson Swap” is more like a half-day affair. Still, $340/mo for five cars can’t be beat.

Time flies, and it will be autumn before you know it. I hope I’ve provided you with some storage options you didn’t know were available. In the meantime, burn rubber while the sun shines.

—Rob

(Rob Siegel has been writing the column The Hack Mechanic™ for BMW CCA Roundel Magazine for 35 years, and is the author of eight automotive books. They can be found here on Amazon, or personally-inscribed copies can be ordered directly from Rob.)

My cars (under grey covers) in the cavernous Monson warehouse.