Make Your Own Secret BatCave!

You may have seen some of our posts on doors that look like plain ordinary bookshelves, and drooled a bit. It just sounds so decadent, and sort of Addams Family-ish, having a secret room in your house concealed by a bookcase! We have hinted at this before - the instructions for creating a jib door, along with the jib door decorating idea which utilises book facades are one way of creating a room in your home hidden by books - but it isn’t quite the same as having an actual, opening book case in your home, a secret door to a secret room.

Of course, unless you plan to knock out some walls and build onto the outside of your house, you’ll have to build the bookshelf to cover an existing door. That’s what we’ve posted the instructions for, anyway! This is why most people use closets, storage areas or crawl spaces - you don’t have the hassle of moving an entire bookshelf every time you want to enter a frequently used room. Although once they see it in action, your kids will be begging to have one as their bedroom doors … and soon you will have more bookcases than it is humanly possible to use! You also could quite easily modify this design so that a cupboard is used instead of a bookcase.

Also regarding location of the bookcase door, you need to choose whether you will have a single, lone bookshelf that pivots, sitting in front of the door, or whether you will have a bank of shelves covering most of the wall, as the movies tend to do. Having a single book case in front of the door is much easier to build, as there are no calculations for clearances etc. Making the pivoting bookcase part of a bank of cases is much more effective, and much more hidden. It depends what you want out of it, really … isn’t that generous of us, to give you all that free rein!

In our example project, it cost US$350 (£230) to build this - however that could come up a bit, depending on how much of the work you need to outsource, like welding and cutting wood.

To start, you’ll have to put your Maths hat on, and get your old geometry book out. You may want to work as a team, because I often find those skilled at maths are not necessarily skilled at screwing things together!

• Make a scale drawing of your door, and any surrounding shelves. Grid paper is great for this, there’s less measuring to do. Once you have marked all of the outside measurements of the bookcases as well as the door’s measurements,
• You may want to cut out a different piece of paper, scaled to represent the moving part of your book case. This allows you to test various pivot points, to see where the shelf will rub at a given size, using a drawing pin as a pivot point on the paper. Just cut pieces off to make your bookcase smaller!
• In our example case, the width of the case was 42″, and the pivot point was set 7″ in from the right hand side, and 2″ in from the front. The non-centred pivot point allows you to make the case wider, without having to worry about extra clearance room.

Building the Frame
• If you want the bookshelf to be full of real books, or anything else, hinging it to one of the existing shelves in a bank is not going to do the trick. It will need to be strong, and steel framing is a great way to ensure this. Use square hollow steel - around 1.5″ square is a good, manageable size.
• Calculate the size for your frame, leaving 2 inches of clearance at the floor and at the ceiling (for the 1.5″ steel anchors), and the clearance that you have calculated was necessary at the sides.
• You will need to either weld yourself, or have welded in, two x ¾ inch thick and 4″ long bolts to use as the pivot pins. The bolt heads will sit inside the hollow steel frame, while the body sticks out.
• The bolts should be welded at distance that in from the side of the shelf that you calculated for your pivot point. In the example, the pivot point was 7″ in from the side, so the bolts were welded 7″ in from the side of the frame.

Finishing the Frame
• To prevent back and forth rocking, you can attach a short piece of scrap steel perpendicular to the frame you’ve created, rather than building two separate parallel frames and joining them together. This should be around 6″ long.
• Insert a brass ¾ bearing into the 1″ holes of the pivot points at both ceiling and floor.
• You need to make, or have made, 2 anchor boxes to install in your ceiling and floor anchors. In the example these were made of steel, 2″x2″, and had 1″ holes cut in them to receive the ¾” brass bearings.
• The ceiling anchor will be a piece of square hollow steel, the same as used for the frame.
• You’ll also need a washer between the brass bushing and the bolt.
• You’ll need to make a stopper that hits the steel frame, to prevent your bookcase from bashing into your wall constantly. Nice way to break down your house! Make a wooden stopper to mount to the wall at the upper end, long enough to reach the steel before the bookcase door reaches your wall … crash!

Building the wooden bookcase
• You’ll need to build the bookcase inside the frame, rather than tacking to the front of it, to have the benefit of the steel’s strength.
• The frame will sit around 2/3 of the way from the back of the bookcase.
• Measure how deep, tall and wide you need the bookcase to be. Cut your wood with a circular saw (or have it cut for you), and start sticking it together the best way you know how! For more pointers on building the actual bookcase, check out these detailed instructions.
• While you have got your hammer and nails out, you will need to create some trim to hide the steel frame, on both sides of the bookcase. You can use a thinner, cheaper wood to create this trim. It will need to be wide enough to cover the steel framing, as well as the clearance that has been allowed for your particular width of shelf.
• Attach the trim on the pivoting side of the door to the bookshelves beside your bookcase door, and attach the trim on the opening side to the door itself. If you have chosen to make a single pivoting bookcase, and leave the surrounding area open, you’ll need to make some thin, tall boxes to completely surround the steel framing.
• You’ll need to bevel the trim on the pivoting side of the door to allow clearance for opening and closing.
• There will also be trim on the top and bottom of the swinging bookcase door, to cover the floor and ceiling anchor steel.

Paint, decorate, fill and then hide!



One Response to “Make Your Own Secret BatCave!”

1. Marti says:

   3 September 2009 at 8:36 pm

   Would love to see your video, but it’s not working.