SafeRacks 2x6 Overhead Garage Storage Rack, White, 24"-45" Height

Why it's worth it

A 2-by-6-foot steel rack that bolts into two ceiling joists and hangs 24 to 45 inches down, holding up to 300 pounds. It turns the dead air above your car into a home for holiday bins and camping gear.

Look up. A two-car garage has roughly 400 square feet of ceiling doing absolutely nothing, and this rack claims about 12 of them without costing you an inch of floor. That's where the artificial tree, the coolers, the tent and the box of outgrown kid clothes should live — bulky enough to be in the way, used rarely enough that dragging out a ladder isn't a hardship.

The mounting is what separates a safe overhead rack from a scary one. These brackets are 14-gauge steel and span two joists, fastened with Grade 8 lag bolts. Racks that hang from a single joist, or worse from drywall anchors, have a real failure mode: the load shifts, the garage door shakes the ceiling, and the anchor slowly walks out. Spanning two joists takes that off the table.

From our review of 6 heavy-duty garage shelving, by David Sinclair, Managing Editor

What we like

• +Look up. A two-car garage has roughly 400 square feet of ceiling doing absolutely nothing, and this rack claims about 12 of them…
• +The mounting is what separates a safe overhead rack from a scary one
• +The drop adjusts from 24 to 45 inches, which covers 8-foot ceilings up through 10-foot ones while leaving about seven feet of…

What to know

• –Installation is the complaint
• –Three hundred pounds is a real ceiling, well under any floor rack here, and access is inherently slow