In Tennessee, Building Inspectors are suprisingly affordable.
Build it yourself, and don’t tell anyone.
iamthewalrus(:3= has the right idea. The only way to keep it a secret is to do it yourself and tell nobody.
Having designed quite a few houses (and supervised their construction-mostly in the Dallas area, around 4000 sf), I have a few insites.
First, a lot of people want ‘safe rooms’. These are usually hidden (obviously). To do it legally, you just make it part of the plans you submit. They lock from the inside so anyone with this info wouldn’t really help them (they also have seperate, hidden phone lines). Architectects or designers would not be concerned with this at all.
They also design hidden storage space - I designed a fur coat closet that was acessed by a spiral stair in the floor of the regular closet. This is something you might want to keep close to the vest. However every contractor on that jobsite knew it was there.
A LOT of people retrofit rooms after they get green tagged and the inspector had left. The reason for this is two-fold; 1. It saves money by doing yourself and 2. (the bigger reason) was that it lowered the property tax (less SF). In this case you just don’t tell the architect your plan. Not that they would care.
Now a truely secret room would require bribeing a designer. But as pointed out earlier, it’s not that hard to do. In a good size house an inspector can measure all he or she wants and will probaly never discover the room in question. He/she will measure the rooms on the submitted plans, when that checks out - green tag.
The best solution is to build the room, designate it on the plans as ‘future’ expansion, and the good folks at the county/city will assume you will fess up when you get around to it. Again, no red flags to designers.
But if you need a place to keep keep kidknap victems…yeah, you might want to build that yourself. :dubious:
Hope this helps
Sorry, didn’t preview, in a hurry, but when I saw the Mongolian Cluster F#%&k I left, I had to ask forgiveness…
:smack:
In many communities in the US, you don’t need a building permit if the work involves less than $500 in labor and parts. (YMMV, of course.) Assuming you live in a community with such rules, the trick to building a secret passage would be to hire several contractors, and have them each do a little bit of work; that way, there’s no record on file with local building offocials. Some more intrepid building officials may say the sum of the work is greater than $500, but I’m assuming they’re not actively searching for interior work that is being performed without permits.
So, where does your secret passage lead to? In most cases, it’ll be to a room that can only be accessed through the passage. That means closing off the normal access to the room. Unless you have a very confusing floorplan to your house, though, someone can figure out that you have a void, and know that something is in there. Secret rooms are better suited to upper floors or basements.
My house has a partial basement. The basement technically extends underneath the bedrooms, but for some reason the dirt wasn’t completely removed from that area; enough was cut out for the foundation, and that’s it. Remove the rest of the dirt, and there’s a new basement room that can be used as a secret room. The hard part is removing about 3,000 cubic feet of dirt.
Some older houses in Chicago have basements that extend underneath the sidewalk, far past the footprint of the house. That’s a potential secret room location; a void isn’t expected outside of a building footprint.
Bad juxtaposition, right there.
Padeye, you know about the “-” modifier in Google, right? Put “-wine” in your search.
Just as an aside…
My personal experience from measuring many existing houses where the original plans had been lost (for the purpose of submitting ‘existing’ plans when doing a remodel) is that most people, including building proffesionals, will easily miss hidden rooms. There are many reasons for this; Not thinking of looking, wall thickness variations and the inability to see the whole interior at once just to name a few. It’s hard enough to get accurate diminsions on existing homes without hidden rooms. Paper law/ trial law.
elmwood’s comments, notwithstanding, I suggest you try it. You might be surprised.
Thanks Princhester. I gave up after I got hit on ambiguous statements like “fortified wine cellar.” 
Apparently fortified rooms are only illegal in Arizona if they are for the purpose of illegal drug trafficing or manufacture.
Well, as it happens, I have a secret room in my house.
It’s true, I swear it.
It’s was actually an odd unused space, attic really, with two tiny windows.There was no floor when we bought the house. We had the contractor, who helped us do some renovations, put one in. The entry was obvious, that is, until I concealed it with a large mirror. When the electricians were in, I had some wiring added and a phone line.
Since then, the proper, (not quite tall enough to stand in), attic space has been filled with hordes of attic appropriate junkola. But the first 8 feet of this space constitutes the ‘secret room’ and is now fully furnished. Couch, chairs, old trunks, old carpet, cd player. And ashtrays, as, in this house, the secret room is also the smoking lounge, and a fan, of course. Oh, and a space heater and some blankets for those chilly winter nights. (Hey, it’s better than having to go outdoors).
We even refer to it as the secret room, I recommend it highly. Our house is an old Victorian cottage with some alterations so it would be hard for anyone to intuit that there is a secret space in the house. Whenever I show it to someone for the first time they are unfailingly impressed. It’s just so unexpected, that’s the thing that makes it really. Windows are very important though, I was fortunate in that they were already there, for ventilation I suppose.
That’s kewl! Your children would have so much fun pretending to be the Secret Seven, or something.
Your room is no longer secret.
Disqualified.
Off with his head!
Aaah, but I don’t show it to everyone.
Some visitors to my home leave without any idea of it’s existance.
And just because I have told you about it does NOT mean you would be able to locate it.
So, it seems to me, with the exception of the few initiates, as it were, it is indeed, still, a secret room.
One wall is adorned with black and white photos cut from newpapers, Buddhist mandalas are pinned up on the support beams and there is even a proper Buddhist altar set up in one corner. Old blankets, old steamer trunks, it’s very ambient.
I often enjoy tea with friends in this room, it’s quite cosy.
According to the Master here is how one fellow did it.
If NoCoolDadName were still with us, you could hire him to build you one. After he retired from the labs (JPL), he had a business building secret rooms and hiding places. Since he had Top Secret clearance back in the day, he had the “tell no one” habit–that’s the key.
When he did work for anyone, he recommended that they buy at least 2 spaces, since almost anyone is unable to avoid telling the secret. That way they could show friends one “secret” spot and keep the other actually secret.
Typically they were places to store valuables (fur, jewelry) that one might want to wear on occasion without having to go to the bank and get them out of a vault.
This was all retro-fit work, of course. He didn’t build houses.
- Don’t post about it on a Web site.