At last we've finally paid off our mortgage and have been sent a huge bundle of deeds and papers relating to the house.
My first thought was to get a fireproof document storage box to keep them in, but some of the papers are too long ( 360mm ) to fit in any of the boxes that I've seen and it isn't very practical to fold up the bundles of paper to fit them in a smaller box.
The house is registered with the Land Registry, so it's not a catastrophic loss if the papers do get burnt, but I'd rather keep them as safe as is practicable.
The mortgage was with a bank and they don't offer a scheme to retain the papers if a nominal outstanding balance is left unpaid. Instead they want full commercial rates for document storage. They offer no alternative.
So what clever ideas have any of you come up with to solve this problem ?
I can't find any small fire-proof boxes that are big enough to take the deeds, but a safe that's big enough is absurdly huge.
I know where to get a metal deeds storage box of just the right size, but it isn't fire proof. Is there any way of adapting one of those to be a suitable solution ? It looks as though the fire-proofing is mostly a concrete layer anyway. Perhaps somebody has done it themselves ?