Secret Room Builders: Unlock the Possibilities
Secret rooms precede secret doors, so you’ll deal with a construction crew before dealing with a concealed door manufacturer. If you fail to play your cards right, you may inadvertently defeat the purpose of having a hideaway.
While you can’t remove the space from the plans, your secret room builders don’t have to know what it truly is. Labeling it as something boring like a storage room won’t spark anyone’s curiosity. Keep a lid on your project from start to finish. Creative Home Engineering explains how to build a secret room and keep your project under wraps.
Current events and pop culture influence the rising interest in secret rooms. High-profile burglary cases involving celebrities have been wake-up calls for homeowners, while cool hidden doors in popular films have inspired moviegoers to build one at home. An increase in DIY home projects accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic as people spent more time at home and turned their attention to ways to upgrade their space.
Although hidden passageways and concealed doors enjoy a modern resurgence, the best practices for building a secret room are timeless.
A panic room is fortified to provide bulletproofing and high forced entry protection levels, keeping you, your loved ones and your valuables safe during break-ins until help arrives. These climate-controlled rooms also double as functional spaces like a wine cellar or game room.
Affluent homeowners are not the only ones seeking this home feature. It’s also appealing to the middle class, especially in high-crime areas.
More homeowners are making a panic room through conversion to save money and maximize underutilized space. Any windowless, low-traffic, roomy area near where you sleep or often stay in your house is a good opportunity for conversion.
After deciding on the location, you should armor up your panic room. Fiberglass ballistic panels tend to be a popular choice because they can stop bullets, but bulletproofing alone isn’t as effective at keeping the room secure as some might assume. Anyone with an axe, angle grinder, reciprocating saw or drill can compromise fiberglass ballistic panels, rendering their bulletproof property irrelevant.
Steel armor reinforcement is better. Creative Home Engineering’s modular panic room conversion system consists of laser-cut AR500 steel armor tiles with ballistic protection – the same material that the military uses to protect tanks and armored personnel carriers. These uniform pieces are easy to adjust and join. Using a mounting system, you can install a two-by-four-feet wall construction conveniently. This overlay alleviates the weak points in your existing walls.
Many panic room elements are customizable. Creative Home Engineering uses laser cutting technology, which allows them to cut steel with extreme precision and create perforations for switches and outlets. Double-walling the openings is standard to still provide protection.
To avoid detection, the secret door’s exterior should match the surrounding home decor. If you have wainscoting panels, you should have a wainscot door with the same paint finish and color. If you have concrete or stone surfaces, your wall unit should have a similar material to hide in plain sight.
Moreover, you should buy a security door whose core is ballistic-rated steel. Having sophisticated locking systems should go without saying for impregnability. Creative Home Engineering can design your custom door to lock only from the inside, allowing you to quickly get into your panic room and prevent anyone following you from controlling the lock.
Creative Home Engineering’s panic room conversion process consists of four stages:
Creative Home Engineering has fabricated about 5,000 secret passageway systems for residential and commercial properties worldwide since 2003.
Some of the rave reviews the company has received over the past two decades include a glowing testimony from a couple in Costa Rica who commissioned Creative Home Engineering to help design a hideout. One day, the property’s alarms went off, and the couple hid in the secret room to protect themselves from an intruder. The homeowner and his family were not detected, and after this experience they were so glad that they had purchased a concealed vault door from Creative Home Engineering that they called the company to thank them personally.
Another real-world example involved Creative Home Engineering’s shield door installed outside a commercial building. Security footage revealed that two men tried to breach it with a pry bar and hammer to no avail. Out of desperation, these criminals chained the door to their truck’s bumper and tried to yank it off its hinges. The secure door held its own and nearly dislodged the vehicle from its axles.
Stories like these validate the quality of Creative Home Engineering’s work. Homeowners and third-party security contractors trust the team, giving them considerable repeat business.
Raise your home’s security and aura of mystery with a concealed passageway. Get in touch with Creative Home Engineering to share your vision for your project and discover what’s possible.