Expert: Terry V Andreasen (Andy) - 6/29/2011

Question
QUESTION: Hi Terry,
My wife and I recently toured a 100+ year old home with a ~6' x 8' vault in the basement.  It had a beautiful nickel plated, antique vault door.  I am impressed by the design and workmanship that goes into vault doors and would like to locate interesting doors that might be available to buy.  I have been searching on the internet, but haven't found much. Can you give me any direction as to whom to contact?

Thank you.

Ken

ANSWER: Ken,

Occassionally similar doors do come up for sale, however there are several major problems that safes don't have.  The first being that they are usually "installed" somewhere.  In addition to buying the door, you will usually have to incur the removal fees as well.  Secondly, the doors are never going to be located conviently near by, which means that you will have freight costs.  A light weight vault door similar to your description, with the vestibule and day gates will probably weigh between 5000 to 10,000 lbs.  at $35 per 100 lbs, you could be spending from $2000 to $4000 to have it shipped in.  And of course lastly you will have the installation.  While you may be able to do most of the work yourself, I would highly recommend having a professional stand the door, mount it in place and level it.

There are only a handful of real "safe & vault" companies in the country, that stock doors.  While there are a lot of used doors available, antique ones are much harder to come by.  If you dno't have a budget of between $35,000 to $50,000 to work with then you can probably join me on the bench while I look at all the sale boats that I can't afford, but want!

As I mentioned, "OCCASSIONALLY" one does pop up, so if you are really truly interested, then you need to contact one of the larger safe companies, near you to get on their list.  Kind of like the organ donor list.

Let me know where you are located and I will see what company I would recommend in your area.  We are in the San Francisco Bay area, but we do ship nationwide.  You can check our site out at:   www.securitysafeusa.com     Any of the salesmen (Gary, Tom or Ken) should be able to answer your questions concerning a vault door, and give you a list of the ones we have in stock.

Hope this helps out some.

Andy

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi Terry,
Thanks for the info.  I'll follow up on your recommendations.  
The vault door is in Pennsylvania and I would like to bring it to Minneapolis, MN.  I think I need a company to (1) remove it (2) crate it (3)ship it to Minneapolis and (4) install it.  It would be great if one company could take responsibility for all of these steps.
Thanks.
Ken

Answer
Ken,

I'm sure we can give you a quote for the whole job.  Costs will depend on the size, weight and type of door, how it is installed, what will be required to pull it out. shipping (again based on size and weight), and installation of the door at the delivery site.

Size and weight of the door will also dictate the preparation of the receiving site for installation.

If you have a vault door in mind, we will need all the particulars of the door so that we can start to work up some numbers for you.

Feel free to email me the particulars and we will put some numbers together.  andy@securitysafeusa.com

This must be a really nice door if you want to move it from PA to MN!

Andy