This Old House Reviews Team

Safes are used to keep valuables like personal documents and firearms out of unwanted hands. While all safes can lock away important belongings, some are specifically designed to withstand certain conditions or store particular possessions. To help you select the safe that’ll best suit your storage needs, the This Old House Reviews team searched for the best safe on Amazon. Here are our top five recommendations.

 

Buyer’s Guide

When purchasing a safe, it’s important to understand the factors that impact each product’s use. Here are three factors to consider before buying a safe.

 

1. Size

Safes come in all shapes and sizes, from small handgun boxes to large, in-home safes. Before purchasing a safe, consider the items that you want to secure. If you only have a few personal items, consider buying a small, weatherproof safe. If you want to store larger items like handguns and jewelry, consider investing in a large model.

 

2. Weatherproof 

While items can be replaced, it’s nice to have a safe that can keep important documents protected under any circumstance. If you’re storing personal identification and other documents that are difficult to replace, select a safe that’s both fireproof and waterproof.

 

3. Entry

Some safes only open with a manual entry that requires a physical key to open the structure. Other safes have multiple options for entry, including an electric keypad or manual key.

 

FAQs

• Where should I hide a safe?

Safes should be stored out of sight. While it’s not always feasible to make a designated space for your safe, you can make space in a wall or under the floor to get it out of plain sight. If that’s not an option, keep your safe hidden in a closet or behind a large piece of furniture.

• Should I bolt down my safe?

If you’re able to, you should bolt down your safe to prevent thieves from carrying it off with them in the event of a burglary.

• Will paper money burn in a fireproof safe?

If your safe is fireproof, it can protect cash and other personal belongings from distortion and damage caused by a fire.

 

Why Trust The This Old House Reviews Team

This Old House has empowered homeowners for more than four decades with top-notch home improvement content in the form of television programs, print media, and digital content on its website and social media platforms. The This Old House Reviews Team focuses on creating in-depth product and service review content to help inform your purchasing decision for just about any item or resource that you might need for your home. The This Old House Reviews Team has written over 1,000 reviews on products in the home space, from cordless drills to kitchen trash cans, lawn mowers, and dining room decorations. 

We recommend products in each review using an intensive research process, spending hours combing through the best available models on Amazon. For a product to make our list of top picks, it must hold a solid sales record on Amazon, have consistently positive customer reviews, and offer unique features, among other factors. After narrowing down our list of recommendations, we conduct additional research and sometimes in-person testing to ensure that the products meet our standards. Once we conclude the research phase, we craft a well-rounded, user-friendly article that includes our recommended products and additional information to help homeowners like you make the right purchase.

 

The This Old House Reviews team provides overviews of select products that are top-selling on Amazon and/or popular in consumer searches. Our team evaluates the products based on industry research, consumer reviews, pricing data, hands-on testing in select cases, and other objective criteria unique to a given product line. Unless otherwise noted, these product reviews are intended to help inform buying decisions for DIY or other non-pro users only. Editor’s picks are made by members of the Reviews team, and do not imply an endorsement by the experts on This Old House or Ask This Old House.