Like this cheery cell that Josef Fritzl kept his children in for 24 years?

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I trust it's not your intent. But the idea of secret spaces for younguns gives me the creeps.

Dear ILMBG,

It's too bad you got such stupid/LCD (lowest common demonimator) responses.

Keep looking. Hinges on bookcases is not rocket science. I'm sure you can find a cabinet maker or carpenter to create what you want.

www.HideADoor.com

www.hiddendoors.com

www.hiddendoorsdirect.com
For anyone to ascribe such negative thoughts to your posting is a shame. Enjoy your house, make it yours.

Regards,

Jim

That is an unwarranted characterization. I hope the rest of the thread takes a more even-handed turn.

The op has fun, cheery intentions. Secret passageways, hidden cupboards and rooms, even a cubby under the stairs, are fun for kids. Grownups, too. The responders understood that, acknowledged it, just offered a different take and some tips.

sue36 has very good points re safety. She also offered an idea of how to work safety in (via a second entry).

I am not a firefighter, but I work with them at fire scenes and she is right, a completely hidden room could lead to a terrible tragedy. It is hard enough to find children when they are where they are expected to be.

That said, one of the things I had thought of was a small door in the connecting wall of two bedroom closets.... This post and the replies will jog me into thinking more deeply about it before doing it.

To the op: Hope you find a fun, safe solution!

Bull.

To invoke scare tactics of child abuse and injury or death is not intelligent or even competent.

To simply suggest safety steps is always good.

Invoking fear is not.

Adults already know about electricity, propane, radon, UV, stairways, fireplaces, knives, gasoline, etc.

I fail to understand the need to overstate, frighten, damper, or censor.

YMMV

I certainly do not understand some of your posts- a room with a hidden door/whatever is certainly not in any way indicitive of using it for undesirable reasons! What is wrong with you! A den-like room with walls of books with cherry/walnut molded paneling, a small fireplace , a cup of hot chocolate/Kahlua doesn't provoke any scary emotions from anybody I know. A room like that, for myself and most people could also be used for when I travel for months ar a time- It would be a good place for jewelry, investment pieces and the like, with a safe in it. As a way to reach a walk-out basement, there would of course be patio sliders also.
Sue- you are right- I didn't even think of the safety part- there won't be any children, but at some point in my life- or after it, it would become somebody else's home. It would have to be a hidden room 'that everybody knew about!'. I still like the bathroom one- behind a dressing room mirror...that would blend in with bedroom/dressing area/bathroom, and not be a pain in the b to get to.
jimonthbeach- I have had two of the sites for a year or so, but not the third-thanks
By the way- the house that I mentioned in first post certainly did not do any damage to any of us kids- we loved that house. Unless we are all so deeply, thoroughly, irreversibly damaged that we don't know it!
I think it is a charming idea! Just because you own a gun doesn't mean you kill somebody with it, does it?

Having raised several children I would say it is best to give them well scaled spaces they can transform with their own imaginations rather than trying to provide clever spaces designed by adults. You are more likely to find them making a fort out of the swing set or a club in the laundry room than to use the house in some clever way you thought of.

When we get back on our feet in a couple of years, we hope to install several hidden doors in our new home. Our floorplan sort of rambles and meanders, so the real identity of the doors would not be obvious. It's an idea that has appealed to dh & me for decades, but we never lived in a house that seemed suited to them.

Here are some other websites to check out:

www.nichedoors.com

www.secretdoorways.com

www.decoradoors.com

www.spacesandiego.com

Budget permitting I'd love to do two along a passageway in the finished basement (small exercise rm. & storage rm. - future wine cellar), one for the laundry rm. off the butler's pantry, one leading to a passageway upstairs that is part of an addition intended for the builder's second potential buyer, and one in dh's den to disguise an odd door leading to the master suite.

Good luck to the OP!

I myself love the idea. I saw on HGTV a few weeks ago a show on hidden doors and rooms and I just loved it. I believe as long as everyone is aware of them that there is no problem. We are doing a few hidaways in our house for the grandsons. There not great scales just hidden entrences to other rooms. I love designing kids rooms and I used to do it for a living and I just love this idea to put a little spark and imagination into there lives. I also think its great to store your valubles in as well. You just keep searching you will come up with something.

Not hidden, but a cool hide-a-way. Scroll down to mongoct"s response.

Here is a link that might be useful: hide-a-way

Sorry to grate the sensibilities of those fans of hidden nooks and secret spaces.

Talk about a fetishistic niche market! I had no idea!

I've come across two instances. Sort of. One a secret staircase a carpenter friend told me he built from a second floor bedroom leading to narrow stairs to the basement and thence to a walkout. The client was "connected," as they say. Another was a tunnel from a basement to a garage, again for a quick exit. When I was a real estate agent, I came across lots of "interesting" situations.

Worked on a home that had an underground tunnel from the house to the garage because they didn't want to deal with the elements. Mole People!

jim, I wish there were a way to pm on this forum. I think you are overstating both the intent and actual point of worthy's post...and overstating it in an unnecessarily harsh way, calling an otherwise fair post "stupid" and replying to mine with the word "bull." Why so much hostility? So far, yours is the only truly disturbing or offensive note I see in this thread.

ilmbg's original post references "what you did for your kid's room...," so it is logical that worthy and I believed this was for children. Worthy offered her feeling without prejudice--"I trust that's not your intent." IDK if she intended a bit of levity or a true caution. Either way, the caution is well taken--while for many, this is a charming and fun idea, not taking away from that at all, for others, it is neither charming nor fun. For some children, including those who might have been visiting with the op's presumed chldren, such a room would be an issue.

I have kids, and worthy's post jogged me into reconsidering even a little door between closets simply because of the issues one of them has and others who visit the house have. Just something to think about and personally I'm glad worthy posted because even though I am an adult and should know, it doesn't hurt, sometimes, to be reminded that not everyone's life experience is the same.

Not taking away from either, clearly there are some safety issues that would need to be considered unless the FD knows your home well. This is not fear mongering, it is a friendly, sensible suggestion. I live in a very small, rural town but have been to several fire scenes and a flood in just the past few years. There are many things I've learned to be cautious about in that time.

So I don't think it is helpful to come out of the gate in such an insulting manner and needlessly introduce an adversarial tone where there was none.

Hadley,

Your points are received and accepted.

Jim

Back to the original posters questions, we have done quite a few "secret" touches and considered and investigated doing more. And all were in keeping (and actually facilitated) a smaller house plan.

We have:

-- two "secret bookcase" doors (one allowed us to attractively put our mechanical room more centrally located in the middle of the house (less costly and more energy efficient), the other is more for fun)

-- one tiny "secret passageway" pocket door between the two kid's rooms (designed to by hidden behind two wardrobes with holes cut out of the back)

-- a disguised door built-into the paneling of our dining room (again, allowed us to have another access to a extra bedroom without an unseemingly looking door in our beautiful formal dining room)

-- a disguised separate entrance (hidden behind shutters so no one confuses it for the front door) so I can unload the groceries directly into the pantry under our carriage driveway instead of walking around

-- two doors (in two baths) disguised as full-length mirrors (one sliding --leads to the master closet, one framed -- gives privacy/access to another bedroom).

-- plus a few other secrets I won't post for everyone on the internet ;-)

If you have any specific questions about anything we've done, I'd be happy to oblige.

But in general, my advice is to definitely get estimates from a good trim carpenter and use a little imagination. These things don't have to be expensive (and all those hide-a-door type websites definitely are).

Good luck!

I once spent a week in a house that had a secret room. It was entered through false wall in the back of a walk-in closet in the master bedroom. The owner thought it had been used during Prohibition for the storage of illicit alcohol.

One easy way to make a secret room safer would be to put a window in it large enough to allow escape, just as you would for a bedroom. Especially if the house is large and irregularly shaped, most people have trouble matching up windows with the rooms inside. The presence of the window would not betray the existence of the hidden room.

the responses to this post are quite amusing to me, as i had posted a few weeks back about building fire ladders inside the walls between the joists below windows. this way, instead of trying to locate a ladder hidden away inside a closet somewhere AND making sure the ladder was properly hooked onto the window sill, my children could simply open a panel and toss it out the window. some implied this was unsafe. i found some replies amazingly ridiculous, to say the very least.

i'm getting a bit tired of every coin having two sides.

Again, I think it is making a castle out of a nook...none of the replies to the op's post here has been all that negative or ridiculous. There is no great controversy here, only a request for civility, which was accepted.

"i'm getting a bit tired of every coin having two sides."

Huh? Every coin DOES have 2 sides.

I recently completed a project to do exactly this. After recently completing a kitchen remodel, the plan was to make a small broom closet outside the kitchen, that would open into the living room. However having a normal looking door in that location would have looked out-of-place.

After some research, I found several of the websites listed above and none of them were exactly what I was looking for, and as someone noted they are not exactly cheap. I also found a site named facadedoor.com which seems to sell bookcase doors through Home Depot, but their offered sized were bigger that I could use. (and no prices are listed anywhere)

So instead I built and installed a bookcase door of my own design.

The hinges were the most difficult thing to figure out. I ended up going with heavy duty swing clear hinges (from Hardware Source and then carefully placed the frame trim so that it covered most of the hinges. You can see the barrel of the hinge protruding from the right edge of the trim in the first picture below.

The other big difficulty was remembering enough of college trigonometry to figure out how much the sides of the cabinet needed to slope in at the back of the cabinet so that the door would be able to swing open. (In my case the answer was 12.5 degrees)

The sides, top bottom and shelves are 1x8 poplar, the bottom panel and the back are 1/2" plywood. The face frame is 1x3 poplar. The costs for materials was about $250. I already had a table saw, a miter saw, and a router, but I needed to buy a pocket screw jig kit.

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Some of the above posts have made realize that safety-wise the design needs a little more work, since there is no way to undo the latch from the inside of the closet. Although the broom closet is small enough that I don't think an adult could fit in there with the door closed a small child probably could, and I'd really hate to find an actual skeleton in my closet.