I live down a little mews which has a few parking spaces for the residents but not many. The mews is off a main road where there is a resident permit holder scheme in place between 8:30am and 6:30pm, Monday to Saturday. So far, I’ve resisted getting a permit. During the week, I’m away at work between those hours – I’m out of the house before 8:30 in the morning and I don’t get home until after 6:30pm – so I only need parking overnight and don’t have a problem. Only on one occasion has my alarm clock not gone off, I’ve missed the 8:30 deadline for moving the car and secured myself a parking ticket (timed at 8:33).

Saturday is a slightly different story. I don’t need to leave for work so have no reason to move the car before 8:30. Since I moved in three months ago, I’ve been trying to work out what to do with my car on a Saturday. So far, I’ve got round the situation by leaving the car half an hour’s walk away in a nearby area where there’s free parking or putting it on a meter for a few hours. For the first and last time a few weeks ago, I left the house before 8:30 for the sake of it and went and found something to do (ok I had actually been needing to go to Ikea for several weeks!).

Anyway, my housemate recently found out from another resident in the road that a house and the parking space which goes with it are currently unoccupied. So a couple of weeks ago, I decided to take the liberty of parking there on Friday night. When I came to collect my car the next day (long after 8:30!), I found strips of white parcel tape all over the car with the words ‘THIS SPACE DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU! DO NOT PARK HERE!’ written on them. I was a bit alarmed and decided not to repeat parking there in the immediate future.

However, yesterday night, I got home to find that on-street parking was completely prohibited in all the roads around the mews. I circled round for something like forty minutes, clonked the back of my car on a barely visible bollard whilst doing a u-turn (grrr) and got into a really bad mood. Eventually, I decided to park in the spare spot down the mews and leave a note on the windscreen saying how I didn’t mean to trespass, use property that wasn’t mine but I couldn’t find a space on the road, here’s my telephone number etc.

I was slightly dreading going down to the car this morning. I’d taken a bit of a risk and had no idea whether the owners of the space would have upped the stakes on the vandalism or been a bit conciliatory in light of my note.

The note read along the lines of ‘we don’t mind you parking here at all, please just park a little more over to the right as we are one car and one motorbike’.

And that was that. The power of the written word!

I’m going to see if I can park at Mr/Mrs/Ms Whoever’s house on a regular basis!

Ant is gobsmacked by the amount of Ketchup I consume. I think I would be too if I wasn’t used to it. I can quite happily get through a bottle a day which is, well, wrong. I don’t know what it is about the stuff, I just love it. Actually, I think it’s something to do with my penchant for sweet and sour. It took me years to convince my mum it was nothing to do with or an insult to her cooking. Anyway, I’m sure there’s a Ketchupholics Anonymous somewhere in town…

Firstly I would like to apologise to all the readers of this blog that an update hasn’t come sooner, especially as I mentioned at the end of my last blog that I was going to stay on top of my postings. Needless to say I have been busy with all other aspects of the business in this time. Over the past two weeks I have been working on some major improvements to the functionality of the site. Here is a list and description of all the new features we have added recently.

• Request a Parking Space
  Thanks to our new ‘Wanted Section’ of the web site, people who need a space can now show there is demand for parking spaces in their area. Over the past few weeks the Park at my House.com support e-mail address has been flooded with requests for parking spaces in areas without any availability. Until now all we could say is keep coming back, but thankfully those days are gone as you can now see a list of ‘wanted‘ parking spaces and add your own parking space request on our Request a Space page. You will then be contacted automatically via e-mail once a space is listed near your chosen location.Please contact us and let us know what you think of this new feature and also suggest ways on improving it.
• Feedback Section
  Park at my House.com has introduced a feedback section for all of its registered users. Now once a transaction has been completed, you can rate the experience you had and add some comments which will let the users of the website know what kind of service they can expect.For more information about the feedback section please review our Feedback FAQ.

• Drag the Map
  Now you can drag the map to any location in the country to view parking spaces. The website will automatically locate parking spaces within the map area. Try it for yourself, drag the map from London and then drag it north towards Manchester.

So it has been just over 5 weeks now since Park at my House.com was released to the public and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for visiting and contributing to our growing community. Sign up to our newsletter on our homepage to be notified when we update and provide new features to the site.

Thanks again and have a great Guy Fawkes Day, good luck finding parking!