If you are buying a rowhome in Baltimore and require a parking pad, I strongly recommend that you drive your car to look at your house and see if you can fit it in the parking pad. Because we bike to work, and always biked to the house for inspections and walk-through, we never tried it. The owner had a Nissan Versa which fit fine, so we assumed our corolla would as well. The first night we drove to the house, we were like, "are you kidding me?" Our alley is super-narrow, our pad is really narrow and pretty short, and our behind-us neighbors have a pretty massive fence and gate setup that is...pretty easy to hit.
Widening the pad by 2 feet is on the agenda, but it wasn't high on the priority list. I had some trouble getting into the parking pad, which eventually ended in an incident that did this:
During the same week, I also hit the front bumper along the other side of the parking pad. After that week, I called my husband every time I came home and he would park the car for me. Now he just watches me park it. It's not my car, so I follow these requests.
We needed to get an estimate for getting the car repaired, but I didn't want to fix the car if I was just going to do the same thing. So hello, bumpers. Technically they are called corner guards and are cheap and generally available. I was a little worried that they were a bit of an eye-sore, but the alley is pretty ugly anyway and it's really nice how reflective they are. It definitely helps parking in the dark.
We took the car a couple of places for an estimate on repair and got quotes of around $2000. Then my friend recommended Colors on Parade, which took care of the damage and smoothed, buffed, and repainted the car in a few hours while my husband was at work, all for under $500.
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