Had no idea where to ask this, but the Dope always has an answer!
I’ve got a big void under my house, it would be really useful storage space if you could access it more easily.
It’s currently accessed through a small inspection hatch, but due to an extension we are building, that hatch isn’t going to exist soon.
The only way to get down to it will be through the floor of our games room. The games room is carpeted and looks quite nice.
So, I need to cut a hole out of the games room floor, that is easy enough, but how do I finish the new trapdoor so that the floor doesn’t look terrible? I figure I could roll the carpet back, but I’d need a way of holding the carpet to the edges of the floor, like gripper rods, but less permanent. Something magnetic?!
I’ve seen those, the carpet is stuck to the door, but the trap door is obvious. We have a trap door in the kitchen that goes down to the basement. As is done so often it swings the wrong way, up. There’s no way to attach a remote controlled latch to drop the trap door down to get rid of annoying people. All the better I suppose, an alligator pit is not cheap to maintain.
I have seen a similar situation where a section of the carpet about 6 feet (2 m) was replaced with a ceramic tile floor. It wasn’t exactly concealed, in that you could see that this part of the room had a different kind of floor. But it looked reasonable for the room, as it was near a doorway.
You could make the whole section of tiled floor a large hinged piece, that could be lifted to expose a trapdoor (or even a set of stairs going down to the cellar.
I’m assuming that you don’t really need it completely concealed from searchers; just something that works for access but sill looks acceptable in a room.
P.S. Check that this void stays dry all year-round, before storing anything valuable down there.
Yes, it’s bone dry down there. It’s a insanely large void to be unused, the entire footprint of the house and over 10ft high and it’s deepest point (house is built into the side of a hill).
Doesn’t need to be hidden from searchers, as you say, just needs to look presentable. Might go with the carpet plan and throw a rug over it.
I would finish the walls to look like stone (like a castle basement), decorate it with a lot of cobwebs and Dungeon Of Despair props (and red lights and fake “flames of hell” that turn on when the trap door’s lifted).
Oh, and maybe rig up something that knocks on the bottom of the trap door… maybe around midnight when my friends Pedro and Chanille are babysitting my kids.
There is a very useful principle in design - if you can’t disguise something, make a feature of it.
In a carpeted floor there is scant chance you will be able to create a satisfactory hidden trapdoor. So make the door structure clear. It needn’t be something that calls attention to itself too much, but my making the nature of what is being done clear and in a neat and careful way you can end up with a much nicer final solution.
Personally, I would think about framing the trapdoor so that the framing matches the rest of the room’s structure (which might mean appropriate choice of wood, or whatever) and insetting carpet to matches the rest of the floor inside the inner frame. You end up with an obvious frame inset into the floor, but with careful choice of dimensions one that is flush with the carpet. Of course you could choose to place the door in a carefully chose central location in the room, and do something like make the inner framed area of the door hold a rug, so that it both contrasts with the rest of the carpet, and looks part of the overall room decor. Has the down side of limiting future choices in room layout.
Since the operating parameters are that the space is going to be accessed frequently, any solution that completely hides it, will either be very costly, or will fail over time. Even a carpet that is designed to be folded out of the way, will develop an obvious fold line in it after regular use, as well as annoy the heck out of you if you have to go around the edges and tack it down again after every use.
Being me, I would make the hatch obvious, and put a sign on it saying something like “Unwanted Guest Storage Facility,” and leave it in the open.
Basically, if you find that you want a closet in the floor, make it look like a closet in the floor. A nice one. The idea of a hidden door in a room is always lots of fun, but if it is to be in the ceiling or the floor, it becomes impractical very quickly.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned directly: if the access is to be at one end of the room, and not the middle, you can make the room smaller. Move the wall over the access panel forward to cover it entirely, so that access to storage is through a closet on the main level. That way nothing is visible in the room itself, other than the closet entrance, so it wont attract attention the same way that a door in the floor would, and you wont have to wrestle with furniture arrangements all the time.
I created a trapdoor very similar to the hidden carpet one above. I just ran the carpet up to the edges- it wasn’t as shaggy as the version the Instructable had so it was more obvious. And then I refinished the room with Pergo and just put a small threshohold strip all around on both the panel as well as the remain floor so that it looked like a door panel in the floor. My big recommendation is to get rid of the hinges, and just have something that pops on and off, for two reasons: 1. it makes the alignment and seams much easier and 2. it makes accessing the space much easier as well.
For the carpet I just purchased a 1.5" drawer pull to use as a handle and for the Pergo version I used a little recessed ring pull.
