Why A Tennis Ball In Your Garage Can Save You Time And Energy

If you are fortunate enough to have a private garage to park your car in every day, count your blessings. Whether it's being secure from thieves and vandals or just being protected from brutally hot or bitterly cold weather, it's hard to overstate just how much better car ownership is with a garage. Even so, there are still issues you can run into while trying to fit your vehicle into a garage, particularly the smaller ones that most homes and apartments have.

It's not just the act of physically getting the vehicle to fit into its parking space that can be difficult; it's knowing exactly where to stop the car so there's enough room to walk in front of it and enough room behind it to clear the door. And it's something that you don't just need to think about once, but every time you park in the garage. Misjudge and you'll either need to repark or contort your body to get around the car. Or in the worst cases, you could end up hitting something with your bumper or fender.

Fortunately, there's an old-school solution for this that still works extremely well, showing you exactly where to stop the car each time you pull in the garage. You may have even seen it before when glancing into someone's garage. In fact the 'tennis ball on a string' is one of those useful garage lifehacks that was around long before people used 'lifehack' as a word.

The issue of knowing exactly where to stop your car in the garage has been around as long as people have been parking cars in garages. It's unknown who first came up with the genius idea to hang a tennis ball as a guide, but it likely started sometime during the 1950s or 1960s, when people started to park larger cars in the garages of suburban homes.

The way it works is simple. With your vehicle parked in the garage exactly where you want it, you mark a spot on the ceiling directly above the car's windshield.  Then you hang a string from that spot, with a tennis ball affixed to the end at the height of the windshield. Now you have a guide marker that shows exactly where to stop each time. Just move forward until your windshield touches the tennis ball and you're golden.

There are other higher-tech, purpose-designed systems to accurately park your car, including adjustable sensors that trigger a stop light or even parking laser beams that project downward as a visual marker. Some modern cars have also partially addressed this problem with their own external cameras and parking sensors that can alert you when you're about to hit something, but you can't always depend on those to position the car just right, or your vehicle may not have that technology at all. We've also seen people use a tape marking that can be seen through a car's backup camera, but the old-school tennis ball trick is still hard to beat.

Why does a tennis ball work so well for this? They are cheap, have a decent amount of weight, and are brightly-colored and thus easy to see through the windshield. Tennis balls are also soft, so you don't have to worry about scratching or damaging your windshield when brushing up against it.

Don't feel like buying tennis balls and then rigging up the string yourself? You can even get inexpensive 'garage stop balls' that save a lot of the work. Some DIY pros have even come up with retractable garage ball solutions that lower with the garage door. That way, mischievous kids (or pets) don't mess with the hanging tennis ball when there's no car in the garage.

This simple parking trick can save valuable time and stress each time you come home and perhaps even prevent a costly garage fender bender. The tennis ball parking solution is not the only inexpensive garage hack out there, either. Some enterprising individuals have even used foam from Dollar Tree as a budget-friendly garage cooling method, although, unlike the time-tested tennis ball trick, its cost-effectiveness is a little less clear.