How to Hide Your Door Key, Mistakes and Embarrassment. AKA Don't Ruin the Wife's Hatstand.

We keep forgetting our keys but have nowhere to hide a spare outside our front door that is not obvious. We live in a block of flats on one of the middle floors and hiding a key under a rock seems like a bad idea. So where can we hide the key?

Under the rug? To obvious!

Under the shoe shelf? Obvious.

In the my stinky shoes? Off putting to potential burglars, but surely they are wearing gloves.

With the neighbours? Can't trust anyone today! (joking, they are lovely, but they have a tiny baby and we don't want to be hammering on the door in the middle of the night to wake them.)

BINGO! Lets ruin the wife's hatstand/coat-stand thingy.

Supplies

Key

The wife's hatstand

Drill

Paper

Pen

Clamps

Stool

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Additional materials for gung-ho drillers

Sawdust

Printer ink

Wood glue

No shame

Off With His Head!!

The top of this hatstand screws off, bonus! This should make life much easier for us. Take it off and have a look to see if your key will fit inside with a bit of generous drill action. If it looks like it will, go for it!

Eyeball It and Get Going!

To make it easier to know where to drill I wrapped paper around the wood so I could draw on the absolute optimum angle. Using no ruler or gauge scrawl quickly and impatiently the dimensions of the key onto the paper and the wood.

Clamp It Up and Get Drillin'

Get the wood held into an ideal spot using your daughters step stool and some clamps. Here we go, lets get drillin!!

Woah, the wood is softer than anticipated, make sure you dont get carried away with the drill, make sure to keep an eye on the high precision template you drew on your paper...

Slow Down Fella! Remove Paper to Assess Damage.

Perfect, we now have a side inspection window to check our progress as we drill out the rest of the keyshaped hole. Good thinking!

Keep on drillin' and checking the depth - it will be much faster with that inspection window.

Arts and Crafts Time!

Using the sawdust, some printer ink and woodglue mix up a perfectly colour matched woodfiller. Give it a good mix and then blob it onto the area where it is required.

Good job! No one will ever notice :)

Now You See It, Now You Dont!

Hide the key in the wood, and hide the mess you made of the wood under a big pile of hats.

Now to hide your embarrassment make sure not to reveal to anyone what happened today, most importantly: do not publish this on website that is viewed daily by millions of people.