Hidden Hinges and Electrical Concealment for Hiding Your Built-In BlumSafe

By Rob Blum

A long time ago, April 12, 2017, pre-COVID, we wrote an instructional blog piece on a do-it-yourself solution to using a painting or canvas  to conceal a BlumSafe built-in wall safe (“Concealing Your Safe Behind A Canvas”).

Since then we have introduced several of our own products to accomplish this objective – our one-of-a-kind Electronic Screen,  hinged Concealment Mirror,  and our latest option, our Frameless Sliding Concealment Mirror.

But going up to our roots, I still love the D-I-Y solutions brought to us by many of our customers, so I wanted to share this one masterfully created by one of our clients, and some of the components he used for his and his wife’s BlumSafe Professional Junior safes, done in white.

Concealment with Hinged Artwork

Basically, this solution involves a set of well-engineered, invisible hinges attached to a canvas. The picture has the artwork of your choice and is deep enough to accommodate the handle and lockset of the safe.

You can see the photos, attached, but basically this solution uses innovative, high quality patented hinges from this company, The Hidden Hinge, which are also available on Amazon. 

The Canvas to which the hinges attached is from the Great Big Canvas Company.

This company offers a variety of tasteful reproductions and photography for the “Artwork”, or you can upload your own artwork and they will print it on the canvas.  In the attached photography there are two sizes, which represent the finished sizes after being framed using the company’s floating frame option,   22” x 37”  and 21” x 61”. However, there are many sizes you can choose for each piece of art and 1,000’s of different art pieces available on the company’s website, allowing you cover your safe however you wish, provided you have a minimum width of 22” and a minimum height of 30” so that the artwork conceals the entire safe, including the flanges.  The floating frame adds depth to the canvas of approximately 1.60”, which works to cover our regular steel door and display door BlumSafe handles and lock mechanism, but you will need 1.80” of clearance between the back of the canvas and the safe handle for the BlumSafe Professional Junior model.

To accommodate this, you can add a 1” x ¼” strip of trim/ furring strip (readily available at Home Depot or Lowes) to the back of the floating frame, which itself is 1” wide, and easily paint that strip the same color as you selected for the floating frame so that it all blends together.  You can go  with a 1.25” deep canvases for the regular BlumSafes.

The hinges are attached with screws easily enough, as shown in the photos. The only modification you may have to do, depending on size of the canvas and how it fits into your space,  is that you may have to move the wood reinforcing horizontal spacing bar in the back of the canvas if you get a particularly tall one and that bar is in the location where your safe handle is.

Hidden Wall Electric Box. 

Finally, as long as we are discussing hiding your BlumSafe, many customers ask about hiding the safe’s electrical connection from prying eyes, which could give off a clue that the hidden safe exists. While the electrical plug from the safe can be inserted into a wall outlet, it is obviously better for it to be concealed. We wrote a blog piece, also years ago on this subject. Since then people have come with a variety of solutions, the easiest being a plastic wall access panel like this one that this customer used, concealing the electric outlet behind the door in a wall, which maintains accessibility. Many people have used something like this one , a wall insert that typically sits behind a wall-mounted TV and contains its own 110V power outlet. You will see these often used by customers in cabinetry.

Pretty simple, right?

If you liked seeing these ideas and have created your own interesting installation, please pay it forward by sharing photos of your BlumSafe concealment solutions with us to share in our Customer Gallery with other customers (don’t worry, we will maintain your anonymity).

Thanks.