The Creative DIY Safe That Hides Small Valuables In Plain Sight

Sharing a home with other people, especially nosy family members, means that you never truly have privacy or personal belongings that stay personal. If you have valuables you'd like to keep to yourself, then you likely fear the day your snooping child finds them hidden in your sock drawer and snatches them up. You could keep important items in a safe, but good safes aren't the cheapest things to come by. In addition, having a safe makes it super obvious that you have stuff to hide, which defeats the purpose if a burglar breaks into your home.

The best way to hide your private things without drawing attention to them is by storing them in plain sight among regular household fixtures such as an electrical outlet. You can make a version of your very own hidden DIY wall safe using an electrical outlet to hide your small precious items.

Concealing your valuable items behind an electrical outlet is genius because no one would naturally even think to look there. However, the process involves making a hole in your wall, which may be inconvenient for you to do. If you are good to go, there are two ways that you can go about this: making the hole if you're comfortable with that level of work, or using an outlet that already exists in your house's framework. Either way works well, and you will be able to stow away as many gold doubloons, bounties, or other valuables as you wish.

To build your creative DIY safe from scratch, you will need an electric oscillating multi-tool, a stud finder, a pencil, a screwdriver, nails, and an outlet. You can either get a safe made to look like an electrical outlet that can be pulled out, or just stick a box in there and clamp an outlet over it.

Chiseling a hole into your wall is easier than it sounds, but you still have to be wary not to damage any connections back there. First, find the wall studs using the stud finder. The hole you're going to make will be right between two wall studs. Using your pencil, outline the fake electrical outlet on the wall so that you know exactly what you're cutting out. Use the multi-tool to carve a clean hole into the wall and screw the safe in place. If you want a safe with an extra layer of security, get a version with a steel box that can be unlocked.

If you want an extra layer of security — maybe to hide the outlet from your roommate who specializes in true crime TV — you can place a solid object in front of the outlet. Make sure the outlet is positioned in a place where one would typically find a power outlet and then hang a painting over it or even a decorative medallion. By doing this, you'll draw suspicion away from the outlet. They'll be so busy admiring the painting or wall art that they won't even notice the regular old outlet behind it.

If you live in an apartment where you have no authority to bust open walls to install secret safes, you can just use an unneeded electrical outlet that's already there. Before you do this, however, make sure you take the necessary precautions by having a professional electrician do a once-over to make sure you don't come in contact with any live wires. Also, if it's not your home, you don't want to damage anything in the walls or else you can kiss that security deposit goodbye. 

Since the hole is premade, all you have to do is clear the wires in it or at least render them inactive, and then fit your outlet safe into the space. For this method, you should remember that accidents can occur if it's not installed properly, so your best option is to buy a mini safe made of plastic instead of steel so that it doesn't conduct electricity. This is to avoid any mishaps with the wiring that could lead to a potential fire. If using a box, put it inside the outlet hole and then replace the outlet over it. No housemate of yours with sticky fingers will ever get to it now.