Not-a-Secret Book Safe

I remember seeing a secret book safe in a movie as a kid and I instantly wanted one. This had to be the coolest thing ever. My husbands birthday was coming up and I decided that I was going to make him one, because everyone wants a secret book safe. 

The Original Pin

Source: ecoshopper.net via Marquette on Pinterest

Sitting at work one day I sat and mapped out my plan and came up with the method I was going to attack this thing and the next day I went to work. I found a good book from the free shelf at the public library and took it home where my ruler, x-acto knife, and mod podge were waiting. This was going to be awesome...I didn't have to buy anything! 

I marked the space I wanted to cut out on a page, and then began cutting away with the x-acto knife, cutting a few layers deep at a time. That went well. Then it came time to seal the pages together. I started mod podging each page down one by one. Talk about tedious. But it seemed to go well, until I noticed that the pages were drying wrinkly. I did everything I could think of to combat this. I even stood on the book...and all it did was give a weird curve to the book. I then changed to spray adhesive to see if that would minimize the wrinkling. Nope. Didn't hardly work. Getting frustrated I just slathered the whole book in mod podge. Of course right I as finished I realized I now couldn't close the book to let it dry because it would all just seal together. So I let it sit out over night. Here's my secret obvious book safe that I found all dried up and "ready" this morning:

The Pinstrosity: 

What I Should Have Done:

Of course it's after the Pinstrosity is finished that I actually look up online how to make a book safe. I found a great tutorial on The Art of Manliness. Reading this tutorial I did a number of face-palms. I made this way more difficult than I had to. I'll just give what I did really wrong, I won't give their whole tutorial because they do an excellent job at it (so go read it there). 

• Instead of mod podging each page down one by one, I should have just slathered the edges all together to seal them all at once. 
• I should have covered the parts I didn't want mod podged with some sort of covering (plastic grocery bags look like they would have worked great). 
• I needed something to press the book with, to keep the pages flat. I don't have a vice, but I could have stacked a bunch of other books on top of it. 

You want to know what's funny about this? Apparently this happens to a number of people trying to make these book safes. My Cam-man told me he'd tried making one for me for Christmas and used my same method and it ended up like mine. A guy at work tried making one using regular school glue and ran into the same problems as well. Maybe I'll try this another day using the method from The Art of Manliness and see if I have a little more luck.