Back when I was a teen, I spent a summer at my Aunt’s house. I had my own bedroom with an attached bath. I was partaking at the time.
Taking a small screwdriver, I could loosen the set screw on the towel rack in the bathroom and hide things in the hollow towel bar. I thought it was pretty slick.
I also had an old car ('62 Olds 98) that had a armrest you could pull down in the middle of the back seat. With the armrest down, you could pull out a sort of flap behind it and keep things behind the seat.
Now this isn’t hiding, but I use an empty chap-stick to keep some extra blood pressure meds.
How about yours?
(not looking for hiding places, but thought it might make an interesting thread)
When I find the keys to my fire safe, I’ll let you know. Seriously. When we left on vacation a couple of months ago, the last thing I did was lock the safe, remove the keys and put them. . .someplace terribly clever. The locksmith came last week: $149 to open a $10 lock.
In the hiding that backfired department. When I was a young kid somebody gave me a crisp new 20 dollar bill for Christmas. This was back when 20 dollars was a fairly big deal, especially for a kid. We had this massive encyclopedia set. Pretty fancy too as all the pages were that heavy duty glossy paper. I put that twenty in there under some subject I was sure I would remember. Of course I forgot the subject post haste. It took a good long while to go page by page through thousands of hard to turn pages to find it
A good idea for a hiding space I once read about, although it would take a little carpentry. Remove one of the risers in a staircase and put a hiding place behind it. Then replace the riser with a concealed hinge built in.
It’s a great place because virtually nobody ever thinks to look in the middle of an open staircase for a hiding spot. Yet it’s easily accessible and you can build a large hiding spot there.
When I was a teenager I pulled up the carpet in the side of my closet. I used a saw to cut a 2’x16” rectangle in the floor between the joists. I screwed sheet metal along the edges of the cutout so it could sit back down in the hold and lay flat under the carpet.
I would tie a rope to the first case of beer to go in the hole and then slide it back towards the other end of the house, after that I could slide 10 or 15 more cases of beer into the hole and use the rope to get them out one at a time.
A few years later my parents decided to replace the carpet in the room. I was in college by that time and for the most part out of the house. I made sure to make it home the weekend before the carpet was going to be replaced, removed any evidence of teenage drinking and replaced it with childhood keepsakes like stuffed animals and action figures.
When I was in 6th or 7th grade (1995 or 1996) I wanted a CD player. I spent all summer mowing lawns, raking leaves, helping lay irrigation pipe, and doing whatever I could for the neighbors to earn a few bucks. By the end of August I had almost $200 saved. I kept it in an envelope taped to the bottom of a dresser drawer. Clever, huh? One of my friends was visiting for the weekend, and after he left I found $40 missing. I was fuckin’ pissed. That was 3 or 4 weeks of chores. Instead of killing him, I vowed to find a better hiding spot.
One day when I was in town by myself, I went to a hardware store and (using my precious CD player savings) bought a couple of metal junction boxes (for home wiring) and a hacksaw. I managed to get it home without my folks discovering it.
The next day that I was home alone, I took the hacksaw and cut the bottom off one of the junction boxes. Using dad’s bench grinder I shaped the piece of metal until it nestled in the bottom of the other, creating a false bottom.
I turned off the power to my bedroom and unscrewed and removed one of the power outlets. I took my cash, folded it as flat is I could, and stuffed it in the back of the junction box. After I put the piece of steel over it, it was nearly invisible, even with the outlet hanging out. With the outlet replaced, nobody would know it was there, even if they pulled the cover plate off and looked inside. From the outside, it looked like a regular junction box. I put the plate back on, and nobody ever fucked with my savings again. I would bet money that junction box sill has that false bottom today.
Man, you coulda had fun with that. Put a bunch of old Gun n Ammo Mags, or Soldiers of Fortune, The Communist Weeklys, Gay Porn, Furby Monthly, or nothing but beheaded Barbie Dolls wearing camo outfits. Stuff like that
I once pointed out to a buddy that you could more or less get onetouch sets for mostly free by registering online for one.
If you look at the kits, they are the cutest little black zippy pouch, with an outside pocket, an inside mesh pocket, a little elastic strap to hold the sort of film cannister of really heavy black plastic with an attached flip cap, and a molded in bracket, and another elastic strappy thing to hold the lancet.
The flip cap cannister is perfect for a good sized nugget of marijuana, or a gram or so of cleaned and prepped weed, the small one hitter or small pipe fits into the other elastic for the lancet, and the larger frame thing for the glucometer itself could be gently removed with a little bit of care, and something else would fit into the case. Or you could conceil the one hitter in the lancet, and leave the glucometer in its frame, and it looks to a quick flip open just like a regular glucometer kit.
Quick and easy, especially when visiting somewhere or at hotel or wherever:
Take Kleenex box, remove all Kleenex, put cash (or small whatever) in bottom of box, put Kleenex back in, making sure to pull the top tissue out so the box looks “normal” again.
In your house, if you have central heating/air, simply create a new, fake, vent in a wall that can be removed with just a few twists of screwdriver. You can hide larger objects in there.
Stuffing some small valuables in what appears to be a dirty sock in the bottom of your dirty laundry hamper works - as long as you don’t have someone in the house who might surprise you and do your laundry for you when you are away.
If you do not need the cash anytime soon, putting it in a zip lock plastic bag and freezing it in spaghetti sauce or whatever is a nice place to freeze your assets.
Hiding in plain sight - most homes have multiple remote controls on the living room table/side tables. Take one of the remotes, gut it, and put “stuff” in there. If someone grabs it to use it, simply say “oops, forgot to get a battery…” and use the other, real working remote.
(I learned most of these from a speech class I had where they were required to demonstrate hiding places…)
I must have at least 5-600 DVDs by this point, so I’ve always figured if I needed to keep something hidden I’d just gut the case of a movie I didn’t care for very much.
Rolled up cash can be stored in the hollow tubes that make up the feet of an ironing board. Pop off the rubber caps and push a broom handle or dowel through to retrieve your cash.
I also have a (very small) pocket affixed to the inside of the side panel of my tower PC. Nobody snoops there.
That’s also a problem with hiding things inside a DVD case or a computer tower. You should never hide things inside something that’s likely to be stolen for its own sake.
It seems strange to me that people are interested in hiding things from thieves, but not from other hazards. I understand some posters are renters or minors living with their parents, but is that true for everyone who’s posted so far? :dubious:
We bought a fire-resistant safe from Costco a couple of years ago. It’s bolted to a massive wooden storage shelf that I had previously built in the basement; the shelf is pretty much immovable, and even if a thief dares to grab some of my power tools, he’ll have a helluva time accessing all the needed part of the shelf to enable removal. Even after that, it’s heavy, probably about 100 pounds, and he would have to take it with him to break it open. In the basement, it’s also safe from tornadoes, and any fire that burns elsewhere in the house probably won’t even get down there before the local FD gets it under control. If it does, well…the safe is fire-resistant.
For additional protection, I cut up an ordinary cardboard box that wraps around the safe; the front face of the box opens up for access to the safe. From across the basement, it just looks like one more box-o-crap on the shelf along with everything else. So I guess it really is a hiding place, not just a secure place.
We keep some cash in there, but mostly it’s for storing documents that would be a major pain in the ass to replace in the event of any sort of disaster, like the aforementioned fires or tornadoes - things like passports, car/house ownership documents, backups of computer files, etc.
Actually, my house came with a hidey hole just like that. It’s not in a staircase, though, it’s in one of the built-in bookshelves. There’s no hinge either; I have to pry up the shelf bottom with a butter knife. I’ve hidden all manner of stuff in there.
I figure a 1/600 chance of someone grabbing the right DVD case ought to be pretty good odds in my favour. Besides, it’s hard to sell used DVDs on eBay for even a fiver, so I can hardly imagine that’s going to be the first thing a burglar makes off with.
Mine was very similar to yours…except I lifted up the upper shelf of my bedroom closet, slid out one end of the hollow metal hanging rod, stuffed the rod with contraband and put it all back together.
