What To Do? What To Do?

What do you do with a big, old vault door that dominates a wall?  It's kinda hard to hide, isn't it?  Putting a couch in front of it won't do the trick.

So you paint around it instead!!!  And not just boring wall paint, but a mural!!  And what's best, is you actually incorporate the vault door into the  mural, by turning it into the entrance to an old mine.

Then, you go to the local lumber yard and pick out some rough timbers to wrap the door with.  This picture only shows the side pieces.  There will be a piece across the top too.

What's really spiffy, is our particular lumber yard has o-o-old  half-logs laying around, and you can get weathered looking wood with cool knots, like this one.

My dad told me that there's actually some historical precedence for putting a vault door over a mine.  Evidently the Cresson Mine in Cripple Creek was originally a poor producer, until the owner found a room size opening bursting with gold.  He immediately went and had a vault door installed at the entrance of the mine.  I went searching to see if this story was true, and found this on Wikipedia:

 On 24 Nov. 1914, Dick Roelofs was supervising the exploration of the mine to the 1300 level, when a large gold-filled vug was blasted open on the 1200 level. The next day, Roelof, a mine owner and an attorney explored the "cave of sparkling jewels". The vug measured 14 feet wide, 23 feet long, 36 feet high, which took a month to empty, and yielded 60,000 troy ounces of gold.^[10]:78-80

This particular vault door doesn't protect any gold.  It was already in the house when the current owners bought it.  In fact, I think perhaps the vault is now protecting cardboard boxes!!  Whatever's on the inside, this is the final result of what I painted on the outside!