Finding the wall that will hold, in a house built in the seventies
Villenave houses from that period combine blockwork walls, an insulated lining and light plasterboard partitions. Under the paint, nothing distinguishes an internal partition from a load-bearing wall, and finding out is done by sound and then by measurement. Many plans to build a safe into the wall stop there, for want of usable thickness. That is not a failure: it simply indicates that a floor-standing model, fixed into the slab and into a serious wall, will suit the house better.
The fixing, in fact, matters more than the weight printed on the product sheet. A concrete slab gives a firm anchorage, provided the floor covering is drilled through cleanly and the manufacturer's instructions on the number and type of anchors are followed. On an upper floor with a timber floor structure, the question takes a different shape and the location changes. We look at the structure, at how the house is moved through and at what you intend to store, and then draw up a detailed quote before anything is installed.
The garage and the utility room: two obvious, damp locations
These are the two rooms people turn to instinctively, because they are out of the way and easy to drill into. Yet in the local context they have two drawbacks. Damp first: in the low-lying areas, over towards the Garonne and the Eau Bourde valley, an unheated garage and a semi-basement utility room are hard on papers, notarial documents and digital media. Discretion second: the garage is precisely the room that delivery drivers, tradespeople and passing visitors see.
For business premises the reasoning is different. The commune is home both to shops strung along the route de Toulouse and to wine estates in the Pessac-Léognan appellation, with their cellars and offices. In those cases the safe goes out of sight of customers and seasonal workers, in a room to which access is already controlled, and its location is known only to authorised people. Finally, keep the serial number and the documentation somewhere other than in the safe itself.
How does this service work?
Techniques, typical situations, standards and things to watch out for: it is all on our safes page. This page focuses on what the service involves in Villenave-d'Ornon.