Renting out your home on any of the popular home-rental websites can be a good way to make extra money, especially if you travel frequently and your home often sits empty for days at a time. Before you move forward with this idea, you should seriously consider investing in a safe. A large safe placed inside your home will be handy when a stranger is living in your home for a short period of time. Even though home-rental websites go to considerable lengths to ensure that renters are legitimate, you'll feel better knowing that you can place certain items in the safe. Here are some things that you'll want to lock up in this manner before your renter arrives:

Valuables

It's a bad idea to leave valuables free in your house when someone else is visiting. It's much easier to load any valuables that you own into the safe and feel confident that they'll be protected while you're away. Peruse your home and identify the items that you should protect in this manner. If you keep standard valuables such as cash or jewelry in your home, they're an obvious choice for locking in the safe. Small antique items that hold value are also a good candidate for locking up.

Personal Items

You may also feel better if you lock your personal items in the safe prior to vacating your home. For example, some people may wish to lock up their family photos in the safe. This might be nice for your renter, too, as he or she can get more comfortable and feel at home without constantly being reminded of being in someone else's house. Depending on your level of privacy, you may wish to consider locking other things in the safe, too. For example, if you have underwear or lingerie in your dresser, you might feel better with these things locked up.

Weapons

If you own firearms or other weapons, you'll ideally keep these items in a safe at all times. However, not every gun owner always follows this mindset. You absolutely do not want to leave weapons inside your house when someone else is renting it. Doing so presents an enormous liability in several ways — your renter could get injured or killed checking out one of your weapons, or could potentially steal it and use it to commit a crime. By locking any weapons that you own in a safe, you won't have this concern.

Contact a company that sells wholesale safes for more information and assistance.