Getting In and Out When the Doors Barely Open

Plan the gap around your shoulders, not around the door. A door that opens far enough not to hit the wall is not the same as a door that opens far enough to get out of, and that difference is why garages which technically fit a car end up storing bicycles instead.

A note on this guide: this rests on the geometry of a car in a confined space rather than on a garage measured here. See how we test.

The problem, as it appears

The car goes in. The door opens a hand's width before it meets a wall, a shelf or a bike. Getting out is a sideways shuffle with the door held at a precise angle, and getting back in carrying anything is worse.

After a few months of that, the car starts living on the driveway and the garage becomes storage — which is a reasonable outcome that nobody actually chose.

Why measuring the car disappoints

Because the car's width was never the binding constraint. Guides to garage sizing work from vehicle dimensions plus a clearance figure, and that figure describes the door's swing rather than a person's passage.

A door needs a fair arc to reach its first detent. A person needs shoulder width plus the door's own thickness to get through the gap that arc creates — and appreciably more carrying a box or leaning in to a child seat.

So a garage can be correctly sized on paper and unusable in practice, and the owner concludes it is too small when what is actually wrong is where the car stopped.

What actually matters

Which side you decided to sacrifice

This is the whole guide in one line. A car parked centrally leaves two gaps too narrow to use. The same car parked deliberately against one side leaves one gap you can walk down.

Choose the side nobody needs, and commit to it. It costs nothing, it is reversible, and it is the largest single improvement available in a tight bay. Making it repeatable is parking in the same spot every time.

Where your door's first stop lands

Most doors hold at a detent before the full swing, and that first stop is what you will use every day. On many cars it is not quite enough to get out of comfortably, so people push through to the second — which is where the wall is.

Worth five minutes: park where you normally do, open the door to its first stop, and measure the gap. If it is close, the fix may be parking four inches further over rather than buying anything at all.

The gap you walk through and the arc the door sweeps are different heights

A shelf at door-edge height can be completely irrelevant to getting out while being exactly what the door hits. A bike at floor level is the reverse.

Both matter, and they are separate problems — protecting a car from its own garage covers the objects, and stopping car doors hitting garage walls covers the surfaces.

Reversing in changes several things at once

In a small garage it is usually right. The doors end up nearer the opening where the bay is widest, you walk out forwards rather than backwards past a wall, and the tight manoeuvre happens while you are looking at it rather than in reverse on a dark morning.

The options, and who each suits

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Parking further to one side costs nothing and beats everything below it. Try it first.

A parking stop suits fixing the position once you have found it, so the gap is identical every time rather than merely similar.

Wall padding at door-edge height suits a gap that is right but thin, where a knock is a matter of when rather than if.

A magnetic door protector suits protecting the car rather than the garage, which is the right way round when the garage is not yours.

A convex mirror suits seeing the blind side while positioning, which is what makes a deliberate off-centre park repeatable rather than nerve-racking.

Climbing across is free, legitimate, and worse than it sounds on anything with a high tunnel or bolstered seats.

The mistake to avoid

Solving it with padding when the answer was position. Foam on a wall lets the door meet the wall without damage. It does not make the gap wider, and the gap is what stops you getting out holding a box of tools.

Position first, protection second — in that order, because protection fitted around the wrong parked position only has to be moved later.

The second mistake is planning the whole bay around the driver's door and discovering the passenger side mattered after all: the day someone else is in the car, or the day the thing you need to carry is on that side. Check both sides at the position you have chosen, once, before committing. The wider sequence for a bay this tight is in working on a car in a garage that is too small.