While a safe can protect your valuables from theft, the best protection can be to make it difficult for burglars to find them in the first place. While inside a cupboard or spare room, or even the attic, can prove effective hiding spots for safes, a burglar may still check these places for valuables. To help you beat the burglar, our security experts have put together some of our favourite hiding spaces for home safes, that a burglar won’t have the time, tools, or foresight to check.
While a safe can stop a thief from taking your valuables in most instances, many homes still don’t use one simply because homeowners don’t think they have the space available. Ultimately, provided the safe is properly installed and secured to a wall or the floor, almost anywhere can be a suitable spot. With compact and affordable home safes readily available, there are secure storage options on offer for any property size. Not only are these safes easier to fit into a tight space, but they also allow you to disguise or hide them, making things even harder for burglars.
Under the Floorboards
Depending on your home, and the flooring that is in place, an underfloor safe is a discrete choice. Hidden beneath your feet, an underfloor safe can be very difficult to detect, and even harder to remove without specialist equipment.
If you’d rather not undergo the additional work of digging out the floor underneath your home, an alternative hiding place for an underfloor safe can be found in your staircase. If there is a turning point or landing part-way between floors, these large square areas of floor can be re purposed to house a concealed safe with the help of a carpenter.
Under the Kitchen Cupboards
Most kitchen units are positioned a few inches off the floor, creating a small cavity underneath them which is, usually, wasted space. If your kick boards are well secured, you may need to do some DIY to make use of this area, but if they’re held in place with plastic brackets then a firm tug should bring the kick board away easily enough.
While you can’t fit a full sized safe under here, a personal safe like the Master Lock 5900 should fit easily enough (be sure to measure the gap first!). Fix the safe’s steel tether to the skirting board or underside of the cabinet with a secure padlock and a metal bracket, and anyone lucky enough to find it won’t be able to carry the box away with them.
Behind a Painting or Mirror
This is perhaps the worst kept secret in safe concealment, but there’s a reason for that everybody knows this trick. The popularity of this trick is its best defence: it’s almost too obvious for a thief to consider unless they have good reason to look behind pictures and mirrors.
Specially designed wall safes are relatively straightforward to install. While some work is required to create the cavity and insert the safe, it’s very hard for thieves to remove the safe as a result.
In terms of concealment, a wall safe is a great choice too, as it encourages you to add framed posters, prints, or artwork to a wall. These can then be updated over time, helping you keep the room looking fresh whilst protecting your valuables.
Behind Your Books
If your safe is going on a shelf in a spare room or similar, you could hide it behind some spare books. Unlike the old trick of hiding your valuables inside a single hollowed-out book, you can combine multiple books to create an enclosure big enough for a small safe or lock box.
To keep things affordable, visit a charity shop and look for books that are taller than the container you want to hide. Then buy however many of these books that are needed to create a total width greater than your safe.
You then need to cut out an area the size of the safe from the open-end of each book, before gluing them all into a single, movable block. Once the glue is dry, you can place this over your safe, and remove it as needed, keeping your valuables hidden in plain sight. Nifty, don’t you think?
There are, of course, many more ways to hide a safe, from behind a rotating bookcase through to inside a sofa. If you’ve used a clever trick to hide your safe, and you’re willing to share it, let us know @talkwithsafe and we’ll let you know what we think!
