Guide

What to do with the safe.

The guns are the easy part. The safe is the thing that stops a house clearance dead: too heavy to move, too awkward to sell, and usually in the worst room in the building for getting anything out of.

What a used safe is actually worth

Less than people expect and more than nothing. Used safes are a slow market because the buyer has the same moving problem the seller does, and the price reflects that rather than what the thing cost new.

What separates a safe worth taking from one worth scrapping is mostly build. A heavy, genuinely fire-rated safe from a known maker has a market. A lighter sheet steel cabinet, sold as a safe, is storage — useful, and not worth moving far. Weight is the quickest proxy for which one you have.

Weight and wall thickness. The single biggest factor, and the reason the good ones are so hard to shift.
Fire rating. A real rating with a time and temperature, rather than the word "fireproof" on a sticker.
Lock type. Mechanical dials and quality electronic locks both hold value; a failed electronic lock is a cost.
Condition inside. Damp does more damage to a safe's contents than to the safe, and a rusted interior tells you what the guns have been living in.

If the combination has been lost

This happens constantly, particularly when the person who set it has died, and it is a solvable problem rather than a disaster. A locksmith who works on safes can usually open one without destroying it. That is worth doing properly rather than attacking it with an angle grinder, both because the safe survives and because nobody knows what is resting against the inside of the door.

Worth saying plainly: do not cut into a safe you believe contains firearms and ammunition. Get it opened.

Getting it out of the building

A full-size safe is routinely six hundred pounds and can be a great deal more, usually down a flight of stairs and around a corner that it was carried through before anything else was in the room. It generally needs equipment and more than one person, and a botched attempt damages the stairs, the doorway and occasionally somebody's back.

When we buy a collection we take the safe with it. That is not generosity — an empty safe in an empty house is the last thing standing between a family and finishing, and dealing with it is part of the job rather than an extra.

What to do before anybody comes

Leave everything in it. There is no need to empty a safe before it is valued.
Find the combination if it exists. It is often written somewhere obvious to whoever set it — a drawer, a wallet, the back of a photograph.
Measure roughly and note where it sits. Height, width, which floor, and whether there are stairs.
Do not move it yourself. Genuinely. They come down stairs faster than expected.

Common questions

Will you take the safe as well as the guns?

Yes, as part of the collection. It is one of the more useful things we do — a family clearing a house has enough to deal with without arranging a specialist to move six hundred pounds of steel out of a basement.

What if we have lost the combination?

Common, and not the end of it. A locksmith who works on safes can usually open one without destroying it, and that is worth doing rather than cutting it. Tell us when you get in touch and we will factor it in.

Is the safe worth anything on its own?

Sometimes a useful amount, sometimes very little, and it depends far more on what it is than on what it cost new. Weight, build and whether it is a genuine fire-rated safe or a lighter cabinet are what matter.

It is in the basement. Is that a problem?

It is a logistics question rather than a problem, and it is ours rather than yours. Tell us where it sits and roughly how big it is when you write, and whether there are stairs or a bulkhead.