Bedroom Furniture and Hidden Treasures

Many of us keep our most valuable possessions hidden in the nooks and crannies of our bedroom furniture. To find out more visit http://freshome.com/

If we have a valuable piece of jewellery, a treasured watch or anything of value, we tend to hide it in the most obvious of places. Our bedroom furniture offers the most popular hiding place – with valuables stuffed in the sock drawer, jammed at the back of the wardrobe or pushed to the back of the dressing table. But a study with 50 persistent burglars to uncover the tricks of their trade found that your bedroom furniture is the last place you should try and hide your valuables. The research was undertaken by academics at Portsmouth University and published in the British Journal of Criminology.

Avoid the Obvious Bedroom Furniture

The academics found that the most obvious place that people stored or stashed away valuables was in bedroom furniture, with the drawers in your main bedroom being the most predictable place for valuables. Interestingly, the research found that one place where you might be safer hiding valuables from burglars is in the bedroom furniture of your children's room. Burglars, the academics uncovered, rarely searched children's bedroom. They also found that criminals were more deterred by a noisy dog than a burglar alarm.

Eyes Wide Shut

For those who casually put their most sentimental or valuable objects in a sock drawer, they may reconsider using bedroom furniture as a hiding place when they hear that it takes just twenty minutes for a seasoned burglar to rifle through a house and steal £800 worth of goods. Burglars rely on the fact that most homeowners leave valuables in predictable places – such as sock drawers in bedroom furniture. So much so, that those who were questioned for the report said most houses can be searched in exactly the same way. One of the burglars told a senior psychologist: “Sometimes you find stuff where you’re not expecting, but usually you know where it will be. The search becomes a natural instinct, like a military operation. I could have done it with my eyes shut.”

Children's Bedrooms – Rarely Lucrative

The researchers found that although 14 out of 50 burglars usually entered through a window or door left unlocked, the rest forced their way through. The first place the majority of the burglars searched was the main bedroom, proving the popular belief that many of us store our valuables in our bedroom furniture. The next place they searched were other adult bedrooms, followed by the sitting room, dining room, study and, if they had time, the kitchen. Children's bedrooms were avoided because the burglars said they were 'rarely lucrative'.