5 Foldable Finds From Harbor Freight That Can Help Save Space In The Garage

It’s easy to lose track of how much space you have in the garage. When your vehicles aren’t in there, it can look like tons of room for all kinds of automotive gear, tools for around the home, and any other odds and ends you can’t find a place for in your house. But it can fill up fast. Especially if you have a couple of cars, bikes, or scooters in there too.

If you find yourself fighting for room in your garage, then you have some options. You could try decluttering and organizing everything in there with some smart DIY storage magic, or invest in a top-rated storage system from a major retailer. Alternatively, you could plan which gear you buy in advance before you wind up in that situation, or even replace some of your more bulky or clunky items with some foldable alternatives. If you want to try the latter, then Harbor Freight might just about have you covered.

Exactly what you can expect to find at Harbor Freight depends a little on where you’re based, or if you’re able to head in-store to pick it up. That’s because some items can’t be shipped to select states like Alaska or Hawaii, while other items are only available if you go in person. What you can expect to find also hinges a little on what you use your garage for. For example, you might want the tools or gadgets that only come out on rainy days to stay in your garage, or you might find that you need some ergonomically desired automotive gear for when you want to work on your ride.

Trailers aren’t exactly anything you can put away easily. Even on the smaller side of things, they can be large, cumbersome devices that can be tough to find a home for. One way you can ease the pain of trying to find a suitable place to keep your trailer is by opting for a folding trailer, like this Haul-Master trailer from Harbor Freight. Despite the fact that it can tow up to 1,720 pounds at a time, it can fold all the way down to about 24 by 63 inches, or less than two by five-and-a-half feet. Admittedly, that’s not the smallest amount of floor space if you’re really stuck for room — but if you need a trailer and want to economize your garage space the best you can, then it’s a solid choice. Especially considering how large trailers can easily be.

Haul-Master’s heavy-duty foldable trailer is made out of a steel frame with built-in slots for stake siding and a tiltable trailer bed. The frame is finished with a red baked enamel coating, and comes with two 5.3 by 12-inch diameter tires. When assembled and unfolded, the whole trailer comes to just shy of 5 feet long, 16 feet wide, and just over 2 feet high. Something that’s worth keeping in mind, though, is its weight: even before you load it up, it weighs almost 260 pounds. So, even though it’s compact when folded, it could still be tricky to move around your garage.

Sometimes you’re going to find yourself needing to move something that’s just a little too awkward to lift and carry around, like a washing machine, freezer, or some other kind of big, clunky appliance. In those cases, you might find yourself wishing you had a hand truck or trolley lying around. But, if you don’t use it often, then having something little, light, and easy to fold away when you’re done is the most useful choice. One pick that could fold away neatly in your garage when you aren’t using it is Franklin’s foldable hand truck.

The hand truck is made out of a lightweight aluminum frame, which can fold away to fit in tight spaces when it’s not in use. When empty, it weighs roughly eight pounds, making it easy to move around or lift without too much heft. Don’t be fooled by its relatively small size — it can still manage to tow up to 150 pounds. It comes with a 19.5 by 16 inch toeplate, and sits on two 7 1/4-inch wheels. 

Based on the product reviews, users are pretty happy with the hand truck across the board. It has more than 2,400 five-star ratings, with 95% of more than 3,100 customers sharing that they’d recommend the item. Many of those reviews highlight how quick and easy the truck is to fold away, along with how easy it makes it to move around all kinds of items, ranging from big flat-screen TVs to carloads of groceries. It’s not all good reviews, of course — a handful of comments note that the truck could be more robust and maneuverable — but they’re in the minority, with under 150 three-star or fewer reviews overall.

Sometimes a garage is a little less of a place to work on your car, and a little more of a place to keep useful household items alongside your car. If that sounds like your garage, then you might be able to free up a little room in there by replacing your regular ladder with a portable, telescopic option. 

According to the Harbor Freight product listing, this Franklin portable telescoping ladder can reach heights of up to 14 feet while supporting up to 250 pounds. The ladder extends one foot at a time, making it easy for you to know exactly how much you’re going to need to extend (or distend) it by while getting set up to reach your desired height. As well as its impressive extension abilities, you can also fold it away to about 2.5 feet — or 31 inches — when you’re ready to pack it away again, making it a solid option for smaller garages, tight spaces, or anywhere that you’re already storing a lot of stuff. However, there is a catch: a couple of reviews note that the 14-foot size refers to the maximum reach, meaning it could work out to be a little shorter expected.

Maximum heights aside, the customer reviews on this one are generally pretty great. At the time of writing, the ladder has a 4.6 out of 5-star average based on more than 1,600 reviews, with less than 15% of those ratings giving it three stars or less. A lot of the top reviews praise the ladder’s compact size and ease of use, particularly when it comes to folding it down for storage. So, you don’t need to worry about it being a pain to put away when you’re done with it.

An engine stand isn’t a necessity in every garage, but if you find yourself working on or repairing vehicles often, then it could be useful to keep one around. As useful as they can be, they aren’t exactly small pieces of kit. They need to be able to hold engines in a way that allows you to easily access basically any part of it at any given moment, after all. They need to be robust and a decent size to be able to do so. Pittsburgh’s foldable engine stand can hold up to 2,000 pounds of weight when fully set up, while also being suitable to fold up and slide away in the corner of your garage when you don’t need it.

Pittsburgh’s red foldable engine stand sits at 34.5 inches tall, and around 35 inches wide. Front to back, the stand is 42.5 in length. According to its quite favorable user reviews, it folds away small, thanks to its smart design, making it easy to keep out of the way when you aren’t working on your engine. The stand is also highly adjustable, with a rotating engine mount and four different engine arms, meaning you can set it up, or pack it away, pretty much any way you might want to. 

There is something to keep in mind about having an engine stand in your garage — and that’s the fact that you won’t be able to lift your engine into the stand without another piece of gear. So, if you want one, you’re also going to need to get something like an engine hoist or shop crane. That’ll take up a little extra space in your garage, although it doesn’t have to be much.

As well as the aforementioned engine stand, Pittsburgh also offers a couple of foldable shop cranes that you could slip into your garage. One type that Harbor Freight has available is a one-ton capacity foldable shop crane, which matches the company’s foldable engine stand. Using this, you can hoist your engine out of your vehicle and onto your engine stand ready for you to get to work without anything else getting in the way. And, of course, you can fold it up and put it aside afterward without it hogging up too much of your garage’s precious floor space.

The total size of a shop crane is adjustable by design, with different parts of it extending or folding so that it can safely shift your engine, or anything else you want to move around, within reason, around your workspace. On top of that, this one also sits on foldable legs, making it easier to store than some of the more static alternatives available on the market. Thankfully, the foldable elements of the crane don’t seem to have impacted its durability or sturdiness, based on customer reviews. That makes sense, considering that the crane is crafted out of steel, and weighs just under 150 pounds. Besides commending the crane’s durability and quality, a lot of the listing’s reviews also note that the crane is easy to assemble out of the box.

We kept a few things in mind while picking out products to help make the most of space in your garage. For starters, and perhaps most evidently, we only looked at products available from Harbor Freight. Then, we took a look at any items that either checked the “Foldable” box on the product listing page, or that mentioned having foldable elements in the product description. And, of course, we made sure that every product was something you might actually want to keep in your garage, like tools that only get used once in a blue moon or car maintenance-related gear.

We also made sure to keep a close eye on user ratings for each product. To make sure that any products shared are generally considered favorably and useful to those who have purchased it, we didn’t consider any products that had an average rating of lower than four stars. In fact, at the time of writing, all products have a rating of at least four out of five stars. As it stands, every product listed here actually has an average of at least 4.4 stars. To make sure that the average wasn’t representative of a noisy minority, and actually reflected how most consumers felt, we only considered products with at least 200 reviews. Similarly, we also made sure to only list products that were recommended by at least 90% of users who wrote a review.