Take Home Lessons From a Burglary

We learned that most home invasions are done by thieves who are lazy. They look for the easiest homes to break into without breaking glass or using a crow bar. Our home was burglarized through the window over our kitchen sink. The thieves took out the screen on our window, popped the lock, walked right in, took whatever they wanted and left out our sliding glass door. The police say that putting dowels in your windows and owning a dog are the two biggest deterrents for thieves who want and easy in and easy out.  We also learned that it often happens during windy, stormy weather. Here are some other tips we learned from the police and our own sad experience.

point of entry right behind that BBQ 

(we have a fully fenced yard and so no one could watch them coming in and out)

So, what should I do to protect my home?
1. Put dowels in all your windows and sliding doors

2. Get a dog
I won't be getting a dog, but I am getting a fake dog dish to put out on our deck. The police also said having a dog chain or a "beware of dog" sign generally works.

3. Get a security system
I'm not sure we'll be doing this either but even having a fake-out camera or a sign in your window can keep thieves away.

4. Keep a light on/tv going in the house when you are not home

5. Get a motion sensing floodlight (now we have one on our back porch.)

6. Don't keep a garage door opener inside a parked car outside your home.

7. If you have a safe, screw it into the concrete of your garage

8. Don't hide valuables in the following places:
your bedside tables, your underwear/sock drawer, your bathroom drawers, under your bed or under the hanging clothes in your closets. Those are the FIRST places they check. They didn't toss anything in the kids' rooms. Think like a thief and hide stuff in places you don't think they'd look.

The kids, mercifully, still have no idea about the burglary. It took them a full week to notice our computer was missing and that's the only thing that they noticed.

9. Take pictures of all serial numbers of any technology and photos of valuable jewelry. (Jewelry does not depreciate!) A friend who recently had a home fire suggested taking a video sweep of each room in your home yearly to keep track of what items are there to remember when it's time to report to the insurance. Even software (ie: photoshop) make sure to write all the numbers down and save them somewhere not on your hard drive (in case it is taken.)

10. Keep your Social Security cards well hidden. Not in any of the usual places and definitely not in your wallet. At one point we thought ours had been taken and then you enter a whole new level of security breach. Keep a list of what's in your wallet (numbers, expiration dates etc.)

11. Keep a back up hard drive in another location (not right next to your computer!)
I'd recommend either saving everything on cloud storage or getting two hard drives, one that you back up annually and store somewhere other than your home and one near your computer. The saddest thing I lost (the only thing that wasn't replaceable) were any of the photos that I hadn't put online or saved onto a CD since they took both our computer and our back up external hard drive.

12. Get good insurance.
We had a clause in ours that we didn't even know we had which helped replace all of our technology up to the value that it would be to buy it new today. They depreciated each of our items more than 50% of what we paid for them but once we re-bought them, they gave us the money to make up the difference to get a NEW version of what was lost.

We always think "this won't happen to me." Now that it has happened to me, I am much more careful about where I keep things and how I leave my home when I go out. We were only gone for a few hours, but the lady up the street who was hit after us was only gone a few minutes (she was walking her dog.) It's scary but true. Keep safe!!