Secret Compartments for Dummies

Every spooky old house has a secret compartment; perhaps even a hidden staircase or a whole secret room where the robber baron who built it hid tons of gold and all his blackmail photos. Yeah, sure. Modern houses don't have handy hidey-holes where you can stash your AR-15 and live grenades to keep 'em out of the gummint's hands, but if you're fairly good with tools you can probably build one. Just don't follow the directions of multiple-award dumbass Naima Manal, instructions she published in "How to Build a Secret Compartment or Closet" at SFGate.com.

The whole idea of a secret compartment, after all, is that only people in on the secret know it's there. Naima starts out OK by suggesting that your hiding place be concealed "behind a mobile bookshelf, a large mirror or furniture piece..." We don't know about the Manal house, but none of our bookcases are "mobile"! None are even movable. Never mind that, though... 

Naima sort of does OK with the whole secret compartment thing, which boils down to sticking some shelves between the studs and putting a door on it. As usual, however, she doesn't think it through. Since she has no idea what the interior of a wall looks like, she instructs you to cut a hole in the sheetrock and then frame the compartment with 2-by-4s. What a moron: apparently she forgot that there are already vertical 2-by-4s -- studs -- in the wall!

It's when Naima gets to building a so-called secret closet that her instructions take on a whole new dimension of dumbassery. According to Manal, all you need to do is

"Box in the secret closet space on the other side of the wall. Frame the base square with 2-by-4-inch wood and make a top plate to screw into the ceiling. Cut vertical pieces of 2-by-4-inch wood for the side walls and nail them to the top and base plates" We've seen Naima do this before: this dummy seems constitutionally incapable of realizing that there are two sides to every wall, something that in the case of her supposed "secret closet" would make its presence very obvious to anyone who enters the next room. So much for Naima's "secrets"! We were also somewhat taken aback by her instructions for closing up the supposed secret space:

"...[screw] the door to the back of the bookcase, mirror or furniture. Attach small wheels to the bookcase or large piece of furniture that will conceal the closet’s door. As the furniture is pulled away from the wall, the secret compartment or closet door will open"

Pretty ambitious project for a DIYer who doesn't even know that there are studs in her walls, don't you think? No, Naima Manal was, is, and will remain woefully unqualified to tell anyone how to build a secret compartment. But she did just that, and that's why we made her the Antisocial Network's Dumbass of the Day!

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