[thetygerlily]

I will second the hatchback suggestion. We just upgraded to an SUV (baby on the way & it was time anyway) but had our hatchback for 7 years. It's small enough to be easy to park & get good gas mileage, but wow can you pack those things! Boxes & boxes of Ikea furniture, bags of dirt & bark, even a small loveseat once. We got it as our second car to a 2-door sport-style car... it felt HUGE in comparison.

As a Sedan option, I also really love my 2007 Sentra. We've had no maintenance issues with it and my favorite features are:
- intellikey: as long as the key is in your purse, you can lock/unlock & start the car
- hide-a-trunk: a removable panel that goes in the middle of the trunk. It makes your trunk smaller for normal use, like helping ensure groceries aren't sliding around too much (and you can reach everything in that part of the trunk easily). You can store miscellaneous things behind the panel like a car emergency kit, towels, reusable shopping bags, or whatever and still have your main trunk nice and usable. If you remove the panel (or just fold it down- it's a hard panel), you have a ridiculously deep trunk. It's not as tall as a hatchback obviously, but for quantity of storage it's great.

However, I still vote hatchback based on what you described! My friend loved her Nissan Versa (same intellikey feature). She actually bought it because she liked our Sentra so much but wanted a hatchback. I think hers was 2008.

Note- a lot of new cars have the intellikey type feature now, but they are harder to find on used cars if you're going back more than 2-3 years. In 2007, as far as I know the only non-luxury cars that had them were Nissan and the Toyota Prius.