How to Ensure your Home and Family are Kept Safe

Guest Blog #244, Entry #746, November 7, 2011

Do you sit at the office or on vacation worrying about whether burglars are invading your home and making off with your valuables? No matter how nice your neighborhood is, burglaries happen, and the best thing you can do to avoid worrying about it is to be prepared.

Helpful tips for keeping your home secure

Image via: House Garden Design

1. Is your shrubbery trimmed to just below window level? While high, dense privacy shrubs may feel secure, they can actually assist thieves by allowing them to work on breaking into your home for several minutes without any neighbors noticing and calling the police. The same applies to tall fences surrounding your property.
2. Is your mail accessible to anyone who walks by? An open mailbox on the outside of your house or near your driveway is practically an open invitation for identity theft. Replace it with a locking mailbox or a mail slot on your front door for more security, and make sure to take in the mail every day—if you are going away for a few days, have a trusted neighbor collect it and move it away from the door.
3. Is all your security attention being focused on your front door? Many homeowners purchase high-quality steel doors with multiple locks for their front doors, and then have back door that is just a simple sliding glass doors. Thieves are more likely to use a back door or garage door than a front door, so make sure those are locked securely too.
4. Do you leave your spare key under the doormat, or worse, in a hide-a-key rock? Experienced thieves can think of all the obvious hiding places for a key more easily than you can, so you are best off leaving a spare key with a trusted neighbor. If you must leave a key accessible outside your home, try to think outside the box in determining a hiding place. Hide it far from the front door—in the backyard, storage shed, or in an inconspicuous place along the side of the house. And never use one of those hide-a-key fake rocks.
5. Do you have your last name posted outside your house? A pretty, welcoming sign with your family’s name on your lawn or mailbox can also be welcoming to thieves, who can look up your number and call you to see if you are home before breaking in and making off with the TV and diamond jewelry. Do your friends really need to see your name to know it’s your house, or will a well-lit house number suffice?
6. Are your windows easy to break? Tempered glass or other thin glass windows are easy to break in a single blow, while laminated glass has layering that will require several attempts to break through. Many thieves will give up after the first strike. Also, solid glass windows are the hardest to break into, while thieves can easily pick the locks on double hung or casement windows that are close to the ground.
7. Do you keep engagement rings and other valuable jewelry on your dresser or nightstand when you are not wearing them? If your home is broken into, you may not be able to prevent thieves from taking your TV or computer, but you can successfully hide your jewelry. Keep your inexpensive costume jewelry in a jewelry box in your closet or on your dresser, but keep the valuable pieces in a burglary-proof safe that is installed into the house in an unexpected location, like in a laundry room or child’s bedroom.
8. When leaving the house for an extended period of time, take precautions to make sure no one passing by will know the house is uninhabited. Ask a neighbor to take in the mail and keep an eye on things, and hire someone to cut the grass and trim the hedges as usual. Leave the blinds as you normally would and turn off the ringer on your phone. Hiring a neighbor to go into your house every day to water your plants will help keep your home looking lived-in and will keep it safe.
9. Replace your front-door lock with a deadbolt. While not expensive, dead bolts are almost impossible to pick without heavy tools. Plus, if a thief sees you have gone to the trouble of having a dead bolt installed, he will assume that you also have taken other safety precautions and are not a good target for a burglary.

Ensure your home is secure at all times

Installing motion-sensor lights near your front and back door will alert you to someone sneaking up to it during the night, and will also serve as a strong dissuasion to any potential thieves. A motion sensor light can actually be just as strong a deterrent to a would-be burglar as an alarm system, which many thieves assume are either fake or are often not set proper

Guest article written by Whiteflash.com.

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