They sell decorative cast iron key hiders - like this cat.
If you’re handy with a screw driver, old appliances can be good hiding spots. Unscrew the back or bottom and put your items inside. Cut the cord so that it’s not mistakenly used. Also the same with electronics. Lots of stuff can be saved inside something like an old VCR. Just remember that those things are likely to get thrown away when your estate is disposed of. I guess it would be good for “stuff” that you might not want other people to find after you’re gone.
For the where to hide a spare key outside question, those fake rocks that have a secret compartment to secure a key work, except when they look unlike any other rock in your garden. Solution? Buy dozens of them and strew them all over the garden or under a tree.
Pull the top drawer out from a chest of drawers, bend down and look up into the recess. There’s often “headspace” where stuff can be taped up to the underside. It would not be too hard to make a shelf that latched into the sides.
Many years ago - one of the handyman magazines recommended drilling through the basement floor, installing a vertical pipe, and then capping it with the lid of a normal basement drain. I think that they even recommended staining he area around the lid so it looked like there had been a sewer backup. (It’s been a while, it might have been some sort of simulation of a filler pipe for an oil heater.)
The old joke is about the person who kept spare cash in a copy of Dante’s Inferno. So they were reminded of it every time they said “Now where in hades did I put that money?”
The problem there is someone wondering, “Gee, why does Uncle Bob have a broken toaster right next to his working toaster? I’ll do him a favor and take the broken one to the dump.”
Better to hide the cash in the crumb tray of the working toaster.
Burglars are very well aware of all the ‘usual’ hiding places. If you come home to find that you have been visited, you will find it in a total mess.
In the kitchen, all the cereal boxes will have been emptied on the floor. All the freezer packs ditto and the drawer emptied onto the table.
In the bedroom, drawers emptied onto the bed (they want to look at the underside anyway). Jacket pockets rifled and all containers emptied.
This will be the pattern throughout the house and it will probably have taken a pair of burglars less than ten minutes to find just about anything you hid. Remember that when you search for something, you don’t want to make too much mess or damage anything. Burglars don’t care.
Remember that they just love cash, jewels, small electronics and credit cards. They won’t bother with safes unless they are a specific target and after breaking in at the back somewhere, they will just stroll out of the front door. If your car is on the drive and the keys on a hook, they will likely take that too.
I mostly rely on obscurity to hide stuff, like lists of passwords, small stashes of cash, and so forth. We have three four-drawer filing cabinets in our basement, rescued when a long ago company hubby worked for failed.
They’re crammed full of stuff, mostly old paperwork we really should dispose of. Like tax returns from thirty years ago, and bank statements that go back ridiculously far. It’s just so easy to shove the papers into a folder when they cease to be immediately relevant, and stuff them into one of the drawers. And we never seem to have time to go back and get rid of them when they’re eight years old. So as long as there’s space for the next folder to be shoved in…they accumulate. My hubby is also anal about keeping all the paper receipts and manuals and warranty papers for any new mechanical thing we buy. Stick the lot into a folder, label it ‘Garbage disposal, 2015’ and into the file cabinet it goes, never to be touched again. Right behind the folder that is labeled ‘Garbage Disposal 1997.’ The 1997 garbage disposal went away in 2015, obviously, but it’s manual and warranty continue to live on.
So, you want to find a list of all our current passwords? And PIN codes for various bank accounts? All you have to do is locate the folder labeled “Bulkhead, 1987.” Good luck!
I used to hide my porn pictures in an old radio that sat in the closet when I was a teen. Wonder what ever happened to that radio and the Pictures of Lily inside.
My insurance agent said never to hide a house key within 30 feet of the door. I had a couple of birdhouses on a pole in the backyard, with the front hinged for cleaning. I had a house key in a bottle at the bottom of one of them.
When I was a teenager, I hid a few porn magazines in the space between the built-in shelf unit and the ceiling. Then the house shifted a bit, as houses do, and the porn was stuck fast. Some kid will probably find them when the house shifts back, and he’ll wonder why such (now) tame cheesecake was worth hiding, when he can get free porn videos on the internet.
A few years later, a running joke among friends was, “Never hide the dope when you’re stoned; you’ll forget where you hid it.”
During WW II, the Guide Lamp factory here in town made the sub-machine guns known as “grease guns.” They also made a single-shot spy’s gun. Rumor had it that dozens of both models were buried in backyards around town, packed in Cosmolene.
We had a safe. The money got moldy inside. So probly put one of those dehumidfier cake thingys in there.
We had neighbors who used to have a house key in their brick outdoor BBQ grill. Woke up one night to a homeless woman wandering around the house - she’d somehow found the key (no idea where in the grill it was hidden) and let herself in.
No problem (other than being scared) - she left the house before the police showed up, who apprehended her outside.
There’s a brick pillar in the middle of my basement, with a small door at the bottom. I’m sure it was all once part of the house’s original heating system. I’ve never actually put anything in there, but EVERY time I see it, for the past 15 years, I think “You could put your weed in there.”
I once found some cash in a Library book.
I was pretty broke at the time, but agonised over the moral dilemma for a while. It was not a huge amount, say a weeks pay for a working stiff at the time, but it was a lot for me.
This was back in the days when library books had a card in the front with date stamps for when they were borrowed and I could see that this one hadn’t been out for well over a year.
I made my decision to keep the cash on two things. 1. The original owner had probably long since abandoned it, and 2. If I handed it in to the library staff, I suspected that it would probably have ended up in their tea kitty.
I agree that obscurity, and even plain view, may be among the best hiding places. I’ve purchased a few hobby items that perhaps I should not have. Just added them to my usual pile of such stuff, and nobody else in my family notices.
Any Geocachers here? I have been getting good at finding these over the last 12 years. There is an art to hiding stuff in a certain way that only other Geocachers would find. Well, that is the goal at least. I have hid and maintained a cache near my home for several years now. It is out of sight, but Geocachers find it just find because they expect it to be hidden a certain way.
For caching of this kind to work, you need two things: accurate lat / long coordinates, and a description of how it is hid. The better a geocache finder you are, the less description you need, as you will have “seen it all” and know where to look, just from the coordinates.
Of course, there are many ways to hide caches. For example:
Most modern “lamp post” type lights, often found in parking lots, have a metal cover at the base that can easily slide up, revealing such interesting things as the nuts and bolts that hold the post to the concrete base. You can easily hide a little tupperware box inside this cover, and if you have the GPS coordinates, most handheld GPS units are accurate enough to distinguish between the right lamp post and its nearest neighbor.
Out in the woods, your GPS leads you typically to a circle roughly 20 feet in diameter if you are lucky, or wider. Within that circle, the cache could be inside a hollowed out part of a tree, alongside a fallen log (under bark, typically), wired to a tree branch, or up against the base of a tree, often under some deliberately placed brush.
Don’t forget to put things inside each of the dozens of decoy rocks to worry or frustrate the would-be burglar:
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a short note saying, “Smile! You’re on camera!”
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a key that looks similar to your front door but isn’t.
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a four-digit code (which doesn’t correspond to any lock).
Etc.
I knew an elderly guy who got pickpocketed several times walking around downtown Pittsburgh, going to ballgames and such.
He learned to keep his wallet in a difficult to access pocket, but he carried a decoy wallet with a note reading “FUCK YOU” in his back pocket. He lost many of those during his final years.
I used to do just that in places known for pickpocketing, like Hanoi. Never could get anyone to take it. I kept stretching my butt in the direction of likely candidates, who now that I think of it might have viewed it as some sort of weird come-on.
There is a (probably apocryphal) story doing the rounds about someone who sees an old lady having her bag snatched in the park.
When he rushes over to see if she is okay, she tells him that it’s no problem. “I buy old bags in charity shops to put my dog’s poo in,” she says.
Can’t imagine paint sticking to a key that’s being inserted into a lock, turned and pulled out every time it’s used. Metal on metal movement grinds away paint in no time, and the bits of paint may then end up jamming the lock.
Then paint the tree silver.