You've been thinking about it for a while. Long ago, you realized that the value of your gun collection exceeded the dollar amount that your homeowner's insurance will cover in the event of a burglary. (Mine limits coverage to just $2000). You called for catalogs from all the safe advertisers in the shooting magazines. You got the catalogs and pored over them. You've compared interiors and sizes and wall thicknesses and door thicknesses and fire ratings and weights and prices until your eyes glazed over. Finally, you dug deep, wrote the check and bought a safe. Good going!
I wish I could say the hard part is over!
Gun safe dealers are only too happy to talk about the safety and security of a big, expensive, half-ton gun safe. They don't talk about how to move it, or what to do with it once you've bought it. That's why I wrote this FAQ, just to share my limited experience, give you a few things to think about, and maybe save you some headaches!
Determine where you want the safe. I think against an exterior wall in a concrete-floored basement is best. In the event of a fire, the safe (and its contents) won't fall through the floor and the adjacent wall will offer some protection from debris raining down around it. If the basement floor isn't carpeted, put down a vapor barrier between the safe and the floor to protect the safe bottom from moisture.
If locating the safe in the basement is not possible, choose a room at ground level, preferably in an area not easily viewed through a window from outside the house. Consulting an engineer regarding the safe weight limits on the floor might not be a bad idea. At least place the safe against a load-bearing wall.
Measure the width of all the doorways through which the safe must pass, and compare with the width of the safe. Don't forget to add the thickness of any protective packing! Rehearse in your mind over and over just how you'll manipulate it on move day, and you might head off some problems!
The safe came bolted to a wooden pallet. A pallet jack makes it easy to lift and roll the safe on hard level ground. The dealer lent me his pallet jack for the day. If you have to rent a jack from a local tool rental company, make sure that the width of the tongs is less than the width of the pallet! Using the jack, I rolled the safe to the front of the truck, and, leaving it in standing upright, used some heavy half inch nylon rope to lash it to the tie-downs on the wall of the truck.
Once I got it home, I untied and lowered it to the driveway using the using the lift, and brought it across the backyard with the aid of the pallet jack. A 4' by 8' sheet of three-eights inch thick plywood, cut lengthwise into two 2' by 8' sections made a passable sidewalk for wheeling the safe across the lawn. Just "leapfrog" the plywood sheets, and you can roll it across flat ground easily.
The only difficulty I had was moving it through a sliding glass door into the basement. I didn't want the heavy safe and jack to crush the door track, so I again used the plywood and some scrap wood to build a small "bridge" across the track. The plywood groaned, but the track's still in good shape.
I can't even imagine what moving it up and down stairs would be like. If you have to do stairs, take your time and get help! Probably the best way out is to look in the yellow pages under "riggers".
Step one is to get the safe off of the pallet on which it is shipped. If your basement has water leakage, you may wish to leave the safe elevated on the pallet permanently.
While on the subject of burglar alarms, consider having an siren added to the room in which you keep your safe. A high-decibel siren makes it almost impossible to think, let alone try to figure out how to break into the safe before the police arrive.
The Goldenrod® is a very low wattage (typically 8 watts) heating element which warms the air within the safe by just a few degrees. Warm air is able to hold more water vapor than cool air, so relative humidity in the safe is lowered as the temperature rises slightly. The Goldenrod never gets too hot to hold. To work best, the Goldenrod should be on the floor of the safe so that convection will warm the air throughout the safe. It's also desirable that the unit be mounted at the front of the safe, so warm air can flow easily up to the top shelves. Be sure to purchase a Goldenrod with a removable plug so you can thread the cord through the hole in the back of the safe!
If you've put your gun safe in the basement, you might consider getting a room dehumidifier to assist the safe dehumidifier.
Many safe companies sell brass piano-style lights to be placed atop the safe. They're pretty, but how much light really winds up shining into the safe? Others sell a fluorescent lights that mount along the inside of the door. I'm not big on fluorescent light, so I went another route.
The real problem with lighting a gun safe interior is that there are so many shelves, walls, racks, guns and other valuables inside that any light source might illuminate one area well enough, but leaves the rest in shadow. The only solution is the use of many lights.
The local Home Depot sells bookshelf lights of various lengths. Essentially they are long (half inch square) rods with white incandescent lights every few inches along their length. The bulbs are wired in series, and operate at such low voltage that their lifetime is rated at 40,000 hours! I bought one 20-inch long and two 30-inch long bookshelf lights. The shorter I put inside the roof of the safe, as close to the front as I could manage. The lights come with lengths of double-sided sticky tape. I used that to affix it to the ceiling. A hot-glue gun works well, too.
The two longer units I mounted on the inside front of the safe, facing backward into the safe. The one on the right side must be mounted between the hinges. Measure the length of the bolts on the door of your safe to ensure that they won't strike the lights when the door is closed. (A small wooden "wedge" between the lights and the safe wall to angle the lights toward the center of the safe rather than straight backward can be made easily from scrap lumber and improves the lighting considerably.)
The combination of the three bookshelf lights (nearly seven feet of tiny lightbulbs!) does a great job of illuminating the entire interior with a soft incandescent glow. Much better than a single tiny piano light outside the safe!
The Goldenrod cord should be threaded through the hole in the safe as well. The Goldenrod can then be plugged into one continuously-powered socket, and the extension cord for the lights can be plugged into a wall socket controlled by a wall switch. It's very convenient to have all three lights within the safe controlled by a single switch. The small rotary switches that come with the lights are a bit of a pain to operate individually every time you open the safe.