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What is a 2×4 bar holder?

closed 2x4 bar holder that is NOT secure

If you want to “bar your door”, or bar the castle gate, you need to have two things:

  • A big bar – I wrote about “what is a bar” earlier
  • Something to hold the bar – which is called (drum roll please) a “2×4 bar holder”.

So a bar holder is just a “thingy” or device made to hold a bar. Many people think of these as a door security bar brackets. Many people want to use a low cost 2×4 with door security bar brackets.

I our modern times, the most popular, in fact the only type of bar holder that I have found any real supply of is a 2×4 bar holder. That is what I have pictured at the top of this article. In fact, the lowest cost solution is to buy your own 2×4 and simply buy the brackets.

There are two main types of 2×4 bar holders.

  • Open 2×4 bar holder
  • Closed 2×4 bar holder

In my house, we used two open 2×4 bar holders across our closet door to create a pretty darned tough safe room. I chose the OPEN 2×4 bar holder because after we close the door I wanted to be able to place the bar across the door VERY rapidly, even when tired. I hope I remembered to bring in the cell phone. Bad guys would find it extremely difficult to break into our closet because of the bar.

There are also CLOSED 2×4 bar holders, which I find MORE often on Amazon and other places than the OPEN 2×4 bar holders. I find this odd as I think for most indoor security applications, the open bar holder is much much faster and easier to deploy and use.

The closed 2×4 bar holders are great when you want the bar to stay in place. For example, I used a closed bar holder on my shed because I just wanted the door bar to be more like a latch rather than something I removed. Or you might be in a situation where you have a really smart horse or cow and they could open the open bar holder.

The bar holders you see in this article are what I first used to solve my problem of latching my 12×8 shed with a bar rather than a bunch of unreliable flimsy locks.

These bar holders have several problems which my secure bar holders solve. Here is how MY bar holders from this site are BETTER. First I just wanted to define what in the world a bar holder is.

If you just want to see what Amazon has available for 2×4 bar holders, I’ve found them for you here: