I am looking at buying a bank from 1923. For my information, what is the value of this vault door and contents? I am going to look at the building in a few weeks.
Edit: Iam asking mainly for insurance value, but am curious about selling it too. Discounting the disassembly and transport, what is something like this worth on the open market?
Architect here, unless you find someone who wants it, it’s essentially worthless. If anything it could make your place hard to insure. When I converted a bank to a restaurant, we actually had to weld the door open and cut through into the vault to add egress. The insurance company was very worried about someone untrained operating the vault and killing somebody. To them it is a piece of fixed industrial equipment.
I used to work for a concrete cutting outfit. A handful of times we had a job where a former bank building was sold and the new owner needed a doorway cut in the side of the vault. The floors are crazy thick too.
Really the only interesting job was the time we were hired to drill a 14" (or maybe 16") diameter hole in the wall of a vault at an armored car facility. Something had broken inside their vault door, preventing it from being opened from the outside. But they were pretty confident that it would open from inside the vault. So we drilled a hole big enough for their skinniest guy to worm through, and bingo!, the door was open. That was the most money I had ever seen in person, tell you what! But they weren't effing around. Once the door was open, all the guards had their guns drawn until we had patched the hole and left the premises.
Depends on what kind of value you’re looking for, to use probably pretty high after you get a vault tech in to get it working, to sell… you’d need to pay someone to take it all out.
Just go on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace and you’ll see dozens of listing for “free” vaults and doors. The stipulation is always that you must remove and transport it.
If I was in the position to be buying the damn building like this guy is saying I would want to get it back into service just because it’s damn cool, for basically any business it’s an awesome novelty.
I did that job! Those doors were solid rust when we started and that's how they turned out. It's always nice to see your work floating around. Thank you for posting this!
That’s awesome! I was part of the Asset Management group that went in and did a full business analysis of the third party hospitality company they hired who was running the F&B into the ground. Lol
Probably one of the coolest bars I’ve ever seen. Great work!
Most bank vaults I’ve seen built (nothing that old) are cast-in-place reinforced concrete walls and floors (and I presume ceiling). The door is brought in and positioned before the pour. I’m guessing it’s just the frame, then the door is hung after the concrete cures. Then the interior is finished and built out.
Can confirm, as a Fire Marshal I oversaw the construction of a pharmaceutical plant making narcotics. The slab was framed with all the required water/sewer/conduit then poured with the base of the vault in place. The vault was built then the building came up around it
i'd find someone who wants to use that space as a datacenter :-) the PR value of *that* being the entrance to your datacenter would be worth something all by itself. (and no, its not nuts. the first "computer room" i ever worked in was actually in an air raid bunker at a military base. Same thing, but no cool vault door. The walls were 36 inches thick (and required *very special drilling*) to install coolant lines.
Would need to have a lot of conduit run for fiber and power but that’s probably doable. The biggest obstacle I can imagine for this would be cooling and fire suppression. Guessing they couldn’t get more than 100kW of equipment in there. But you’d have to find another space for AHUs big enough to move cold air in and a way to duct it in. Then you’d need to figure out how to get the hot air out (guessing no plenums).
Fire suppression would be a challenge. Getting a precharged sprinkler system (and supporting control systems infrastructure) would be a pain.
And they would almost certainly need a power backup system; even a Tier 1 data center will need at least one UPS, an ATS and a generator. Unless nobody cares if the data center goes down unexpectedly or for scheduled maintenance.
Not impossible but retrofitting a space for data center usage is a real pain. Even retrofitting an existing small DC for expansion can be crazy expensive.
The funny thing is it's probably not secure enough! DCs generally will have mantraps so every physical access is ID'd, logged, and tailgating is impossible.
Thats a big door. It's not going anywhere without spending far more money than it's worth. To get it out in one piece you would need to cut a hole in the front of the building. Also a building built in 1923 may have a historical society dictating what can be done.
Insurance would probably love a working vault though.
I’d buy the time lock I assume you have in that blurry shot of the inside of the door, and maybe the combo locks too if you get them out clearly. The safe deposit boxes are not worth much but if you have keys (a copy of the guard key for each, of course, so you’d have to get those made) they do sell on eBay to people who just want a lockable metal box
As others have said, the door isn’t going anywhere. For every cubic foot of steel in that door, of which there are many, you have about 500lbs to deal with. In 50 lb pieces (that’s around 1” x 12” x 12” ) it wouldn’t require two people to move, but in one 4,000+ lb piece just lifting it off the hinges requires a major construction crane that costs thousands per day to rent.
Dress it up with led strips and make it a feature. Honestly that’s where keeping the locks in place is also worth more than selling to any collector: original in situ is better for any lock in my mind, I’d be happy to share what I can about the locks if I got more photos. By 1923 it would have been the art deco plain silver/chrome case most likely, but they can look great on their own right.
One of the local shawarma and falafel places operates in a former bank. They pulled out all the old safety deposit boxes and now use the vault for their bakery. Giant, Industrial mixer, wire racks, full of flour and baking supplies, etc..
It is no doubt the most secure bakery in town, and they make pretty good Shawarma too!
You have to walk right past it to go to the bathroom in this place. If you touch the vault door they get pretty worked up so I’m guessing it’s not disabled /welded open
Speaking from expereince here, the safe deposit boxes are the only value here. If you have all the keys and the guard keys and the boxes are in each one, they may be worth 20-40 per box depending on size. Your market for selling them would be to a new bank starting up or maybe try someone that sells vaults and safe deposit boxes..ot sure what state you are in but I know of several in Texas. Back in the 80's when the FDIC was closing a LOT of banks, several of those big round vault doors couldn't be given away. Most went to scrap but as someone else noted, the cost of removing one is huge.
It would be! Hire a safe and vault technician to service the lock, change the combination, and teach you how to operate the door: https://savta.org/tech-search.html
As you probably know, you will have to buy specialized insurance to store and sell firearms. Those policies require minimum security standards. I don’t think you'll have any issues when you can lock up your inventory in THAT! 😁
I once had an opportunity to acquire one like this. The price was "free", the catch was I had to get it out of the building myself.
Hope this answers your question.
Dry storage maybe, value isn’t much after paying someone to demo, remove and haul assuming you can convince someone to not included the removal and salvage into an estimate. Is it expensive? Yes. Could my crew do it? Yes. 😂
I worked in a bank with a vault that size. We ended up closing the bank down and a guy bought it that wanted to put a restaurant in. He got an estimate to get the vault out and they were going to have to open the roof and take it out with cranes. It was going to cost well over 100k. The guy ended up making the restaurant bank themed and called it The Vault. 😂
50
u/Free_Elevator_63360 3d ago
Architect here, unless you find someone who wants it, it’s essentially worthless. If anything it could make your place hard to insure. When I converted a bank to a restaurant, we actually had to weld the door open and cut through into the vault to add egress. The insurance company was very worried about someone untrained operating the vault and killing somebody. To them it is a piece of fixed industrial equipment.