4 Handy Gadgets Under $20 To Upgrade Your Garage

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Not every garage upgrade has to be expensive. While many of the most useful garage improvements have a high price tag, that shouldn't stop you from filling your garage with some essential gadgets. Of course, gadgets are not all cheap either, especially if you go for branded tool gear like DeWalt's. However, we're willing to bet some of these basic products, which you may even have in your home, have yet to enter your garage.

That said, we have to preface our picks with a premise: $20 is not a lot of money. For some of these products, that's all you need to get a great gadget. For others, it's barely enough to pay for the most basic model of a potentially useful gadget. It will still be useful, but it might not last as long or be as nice to operate as a fancier version. If you see a slightly more expensive model, maybe on sale, know it may very well be the better investment.

A nail falls behind the drawers; your fancy all-metal pen rolls under the car; you drop the organizer box and spill your drill bit collection all over the floor. What do these events have in common? They can all be solved rapidly and effortlessly with a magnetic pickup tool — unless your drill bits are not metal, in which case we can only suggest you be a bit more careful with your tools.

If you've spent any time near nails, pens, and other cylindrical objects, you know how much they love to roll under furniture. Instead of moving the whole drawer, just pick up your trusty NoCry Extra Strong Telescoping Magnetic Pickup Tool and get to work. You might be thinking, "Do I really need the 'extra strong' pickup tool for some nails and a screwdriver?" No, of course not, but considering how many incredibly cheap (and likely underperforming) pickup tools there are on Amazon, we're more confident recommending something with more heft than you may ever need.

If you want to save some money and have a wider choice of pickup tools, look no further than the Horusdy Four-Piece Magnetic Pickup Tools Kit. Now, "Horusdy" might not be the kind of brand name that inspires a lot of confidence, especially not on Amazon. And sure enough, this kit seems to be made of generic products found all over Amazon that were marked with the brand's name. Still, this Horusdy pickup tool set has a lot more reviews than its competitors and comes with three magnetic pickup tools (two telescoping, one flexible) and a collapsible tray for bits and small components.

Hopefully, your garage already has some form of artificial lighting. Unfortunately, it's probably not enough for any kind of precision work. You don't want to risk covering the light when you're hunching over your work table, nor do you want to rely entirely on an ugly-white light stuck all the way up on the ceiling. Lucky for you, the solution is quite simple and affordable.

If you have the space, clamp lamps are easy to mount, easy to adjust, and fit in most places that can sustain their (relatively low) weight. You can find a pack of two clamp lamps with good reviews for $16.99 on Amazon. If you want something less rigid, Ikea's Tertial is just about the cheapest work lamp with a replaceable light bulb and a flexible body we could find, and it can be mounted on walls and tables.

Of course, clamp lamps are only good when they have something to clamp to. If you have nothing of the sort, you might want to look for a floor lamp, but those are usually quite expensive. Once again, Ikea comes to the rescue. The Tågarp floor uplighter/reading lamp is comically wobbly, and the lampshades keep coming off, but it's the only floor lamp below $20 to include a flexible light that is the right height to function as a work light. I've had a Tågarp in my house for many years — always the same one, surprisingly — and while I wouldn't trust it with my life, I have to admit that it's more robust than it looks at first.

Power strips are great, but a better suggestion would be to install more outlets. There are two problems with that: Installing new outlets costs way more than $20, and it's not really an option if you're not a homeowner. A power strip, on the other hand, is a household gadget so common that you probably forgot to buy one or two for your garage. Everyone knows the feeling of needing a power strip that should be somewhere, but which they just can't find. Do we really need to explain why you should have one for your garage?

Just buy a couple extra power strips. You know you'll use them, and they're super cheap. The Amazon Basics six-outlet power strip with a six-foot extension cord is just $10.14; you could get two of them for about $20. If you don't need the long cable, Amazon will even sell you two power strips for $13.34; short cable aside, they seem to be just as good as Amazon's more expensive power strips.

While you're at it, you might want to get a surge protector power strip. Depending on the kind of equipment you're using, you could invest in one of the better surge protector brands that has a higher Joule rating. Otherwise, basic surge protection is built into a lot of inexpensive power strips, including the two Amazon Basics models we linked to above.

Sure, $20 isn't enough to buy even a single drawer from one of the major tool chest brands, but you can find a few small toolboxes and organizers for that price, which are great for keeping your smaller tools and components together. The Craftsman 16-inch toolbox is a great option for the price of $18.98. It's not very big, but it includes a tray and two lid compartments to keep the positively tiny stuff separate from your hammers, pliers, and whatnot.

If you'd prefer something with way more containers and no handle, skip the toolmaker-branded boxes and go with a generic organizer. Sure, you could spend almost $30 on a Craftsman 30-bin organizer, and then spend some more on third-party dividers to put in the middle of its long, long drawers. Alternatively, you could spend about $20 on a pack of three generic organizer boxes with plenty of dividers that you can place yourself. Your nails won't mind that you've put them in a container meant for Lego sets and knitting equipment.

If you'd rather put your small tools in the big toolbox you already have, consider instead a third-party toolbox organizer. Just because it didn't come with your purchase doesn't mean you can't buy an organizer bit set now. And if you use DeWalt's ToughCase system, the Tough Case Organizer is quite cheap (about $9) and locks onto other members of the toolbox system.

Since we were working with a strict $20 budget, price was the starting point for all of our picks. We also considered personal experience, user opinion, and online articles from various sources when building a list of worthwhile gadgets for a garage. But price was ultimately the deciding factor for which gadgets made it into the article. The same reasoning dictated which specific models we chose to highlight. For example, we didn't pick the Tågarp as our floor lamp because it's the best lamp on the market. Instead, we chose it because it was the only floor lamp with good reviews and a price tag below $20.