Whether you are a prepper or not, keeping your possessions safe at home will no doubt be important to you. Here we share some ideas on hiding your stuff at home.
Hiding stuff away
There’s nothing new about hiding your valuables away, of course. On a fairly regular basis, hoards of goodies that have been stashed away since Viking and Anglo-Saxon times are discovered in and around the UK.
Since these were hidden away as early as the 5th or 7th-centuries, it goes to show just how successfully the resourceful – or lucky – person can hide his or her wealth.
In Tudor England, in the late 1500s, it wasn’t just the family jewels that were hidden away, but people themselves – in the person of priests looking to escape the religious persecution of the times and who took to specially-built hidey-holes or priests holes.
Hidey-holes around the modern home
In today’s homes, there are perhaps even more ingenious ways of hiding away your valuable in unobtrusive and secretive places, household goods, and other stuff that’s accumulated in practically any home.
Some of these include:
Buried
- just like the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, and many others, you can continue to bury items of particular value;
- you can even bring the theme inside the home by “burying” articles in small containers which you put into larger barrels of dry goods – bulk purchases of flour, for example, pulses, grain, or even the cat litter;
Concealed
- a piece in the American Family Handyman magazine on the 4th of March 2021 suggested using the cavity you can find in practically any domestic appliance;
- the example they gave was a vacuum cleaner but almost any appliance is going to have some storage space inside it – just be certain your papers or valuables are not going to go up in smoke if it gets too hot inside and that no one throws the contents away with the rubbish;
Book safe
- the book safe has become somewhat old hat these days – though they can be no less effective and secure for all that;
- you can buy these book safes or, you can cut out the necessary space from the pages inside any old book on your bookshelf;
- the more books you have, of course, the more effective the decoy of the “false” book and the less likely is any thief going to stumble across your valuables;
False bottom
- false bottoms and secret compartments have been features of furniture throughout the ages – antique specialists Westland London explain that hidden storage compartments are built into examples of 16th and 17th-century fine Italian furniture;
- with even quite basic DIY skills, you could put a false bottom in a drawer or two of everyday furniture, creating that extra inch or two of depth in which to conceal important documents and valuable items;
- if you doubt even those handicraft skills, just taping an envelope containing important or valuable documents to the bottom of a drawer might prove enough to hide it from any casual thief;
False back
- a very slight variation on this theme is to create a false back to the drawer to make a secret compartment or tape your envelope with its valuable contents to the back of the drawer – it would only be found in the unlikely event of someone ransacking your home completely removing the drawer;
Plumb the depths
- since we’ve started a DIY theme, let our imaginations run riot and set about installing some fake plumbing;
- the pipes can be any diameter you like, may be used to store whatever valuables you choose, and you can even fit inspection or access panels to let you get inside by removing a screw or two;
- make sure any pipes run the full height from floor to ceiling or wall to wall, of course, without an open end just left dangling – something of a giveaway is that.
Hiding your valuables around your home might prove to have been a critical – and even life-saving – decision if it prevents others from laying their hands on essential items you’ve stashed away.
The above are just a few ideas you’re likely to find around just about any home. With only a little imagination and ingenuity you can doubtless come up with more.
