Make Your House
the Hard One.

✅ 20 Things to Do This Saturday

The short version of this page — most of it a screwdriver, a trip to the hardware store and an afternoon. Every one works whether you are fifty or eighty, and tapping a line takes you to the full explanation below.

1. Put a 3-inch screw in every strike plate and at least one in each door hinge, so the screws bite the wall stud, not just the trim.
2. Fit a deadbolt with at least a 1-inch throw on every outside door — including the door from the garage into the house.
3. Add a metal latch guard where a door can be pried at the lock (about $12).
4. Drop a bar or dowel in the track of every sliding door.
5. Fit a wide-angle door viewer so you never open the door to find out who is there.
6. Zip-tie the garage door’s emergency-release lever so it can’t be hooked from outside.
7. Keep the garage door down — and the remote out of a car parked in the driveway.
8. Lock the windows you aren’t using, and lay a dowel in the track of any that slide.
9. Spread gravel in the beds under ground-floor windows — never on the walkway, where it can trip you.
10. Keep shrubs below the windowsills and tree limbs trimmed well up, so nobody can stand hidden at a window.
11. Put a motion light over every outside door.
12. Point a camera at the approach to the door, not just the doorstep.
13. Stop mail and papers before any trip or hospital stay, and put a lamp and radio on a timer.
14. Give one neighbor your key and your phone number.
15. Break down the boxes from new TVs and computers before they go to the curb.
16. Lock ladders and tools away — don’t leave a burglar the tools to get in.
17. Never hide a spare key under the mat, a flowerpot or a fake rock. If someone needs a way in, use a combination lockbox.
18. Put up house numbers at least 4 inches tall that can be read from the street at night, so police and the ambulance can find you.
19. Walk every room with your phone recording, and write down serial numbers, so a police report has something to go on.
20. Ask your police department for a free home security survey — and don’t post that you’re away until you’re home.

Check your local code before fitting anything to a door or window — especially bars and locks on bedroom windows, which have to stay openable from inside.

🎯 What He Is Actually Looking For

The best evidence we have on this comes from asking the people who did it. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte surveyed 422 convicted burglars across North Carolina, Kentucky and Ohio about how they chose a house.

About 83 per cent said they tried to work out whether there was an alarm before going in, and 60 per cent said they would simply go and find another house if they found one. Among those who discovered an alarm after starting, roughly half broke off there and then.

What they said they weighed, in their own words: how close other people were — traffic, neighbors, somebody home — whether there was a clean way out, and any sign of trouble. Alarms. Cameras. Dogs inside.

That first number is the strongest thing on this page, and it points at a decision this page does not cover: whether to fit an alarm system at all, and whether to pay somebody to watch it. That is a bigger question than it looks — it involves a ten-year bill, your town's false-alarm rules, and what happens to the whole thing when the power goes out. There is now a separate page on alarm systems that takes it apart properly.

None of that is about strength or courage or being clever. It is about looking like more work than the house next door. That is the whole of this page.

One cheap layer most people never think of: a panel in the window they cannot see through — it takes away the only way to check whether anybody is home, and it insulates while it does it.

And here is the honest arithmetic, because this site does not sell fear: people over sixty-five are the least likely age group in America to be victims of violent crime — well under one per cent in a year. But when it does happen to an older person it is roughly twice as likely to happen at or near their own home, and far more likely to involve a stranger. So the sensible money goes exactly where you live, and it goes there without anybody lying awake.

🚪 The Doors — Where the Frame Gives Out

More than a third of break-ins come through the front door, and more than half of all unlawful entries are through a door or window that was simply not locked. Start there and you have already done more than most of the street.

After that, the thing to understand is that doors rarely fail at the lock. They fail at the frame. A deadbolt is a good piece of steel bolted to a strike plate that came with three-quarter inch screws going into a thin strip of pine. One shoulder and the pine lets go, taking the lock with it.

The fix costs about four dollars. Take the strike plate off, and put it back with three or four inch screws — long enough to pass through the jamb and bite into the framing timber behind it. Do the hinges while you have the screwdriver out; the same short screws are in those. Now the whole wall is holding your door shut instead of a strip of trim.

Count your ways out before you fit a bar

Here is the honest answer, and no clever product gets round it. Anything strong enough to stop a man getting in is strong enough to stop the fire crew getting to you. That is not a flaw in the bar. That is the bar working.

But the two are not equal, and this is the part worth understanding. A deadbolt — even a good one, even with four inch screws behind it — can be forced from outside by people whose job it is, with the tools they carry on the truck. A barricade bar cannot. It is built specifically to defeat the thing a fire crew does to a door, and it is very good at it. Bar a door and you should treat that door as walled up.

Which turns it from a question about products into a question of arithmetic:

• Front door, back door and a patio slider? You are golden. Bar the garage door as hard as you like — you still have two ways out and they still have two ways in.
• Only a front door and the garage? Then that garage door is half your exits, and a bar across it is not a security decision, it is trading one risk for a worse one. Harden it instead — solid door, real deadbolt, long screws through the strike and the hinges. That beats a shoulder and a pry bar, and it still comes open for a crew with the proper tools.

Two practical notes, because a drop bar is not the awkward object people picture. The bar for an ordinary door is about a yard long and weighs four or five pounds. It is a length of 2×4 slightly wider than the door, and lifting it out of its brackets is not a feat of strength at any age. It comes out from the inside, in one movement, with one hand.

And you get to choose the height. Set the brackets low — knee height, or lower. The bar holds exactly as well down there, because it is the brackets and the framing carrying the load, not the altitude. If a room has filled with smoke you are already down at that level, which is precisely where you want the one thing standing between you and the yard.

One thing that genuinely helps and costs about thirty dollars: put a key in a lockbox outside, tell the people who would come, and ask your county whether it keeps a register of residents who would need help getting out. That does not undo a barred door — nothing does — but it fixes the ordinary version of this problem, which is not a fire at all. It is somebody on the floor who cannot get to the door to let anybody in.

The basement door nobody upstairs can hear

There is one door where the whole logic of this page stops working, and a great many houses have it. The walkout basement. A door at the bottom of the house, opening straight onto a grade-level yard, two floors below where anybody is sleeping.

Everything else here is built on the same three things going wrong for him: being seen, being heard, being interrupted. At a walkout door in the small hours, all three have already failed by construction. Nobody can see that side of the house. Nobody upstairs is going to hear him, and he knows it. He can work on that door for as long as he likes, as loudly as he likes. Every deterrent that depends on him being in a hurry has just stopped applying, which means the hardware has to do the whole job on its own.

That is the door for the bar, and it is very close to the only argument you need. It is rarely anybody's main way out, it is usually the least-used door in the house, and it is the one place where "walled up" is exactly the correct answer. Bulkhead and cellar doors are the same case. So are basement windows, which is where the noise-makers further down this page earn more than anywhere else on the property.

The glass beside the door

If there is a window pane in your door, or a narrow one beside it, look at where your thumb turn sits. If somebody can break one small piece of glass and reach it, the lock is decorative.

Sliding doors come out by lifting

Nearly everybody puts a bar or a length of broom handle in the bottom track, and that is correct — it stops the panel sliding. It is also only half the job, because most sliding doors are not slid open. They are lifted off the bottom rail and swung out.

The other half is two screws. Drive them partway into the upper track, one at each end, so there is no longer enough headroom for the panel to rise. Leave them proud enough to see. Ten minutes, and the door now has to be broken rather than removed.

Both halves, and almost everybody does only the first. The dowel stops it sliding. The screw in the upper track stops it lifting. A slider fitted with one and not the other is a door that still comes out in about fifteen seconds.

The one lock that solves both problems

Everything above ends in an argument you cannot win. What keeps a stranger out keeps the ambulance crew out too, and no clever product gets round it. There is exactly one exception, and it is the cheapest thing on this page.

Put a bathroom privacy lock on your bedroom door, and turn it every night. Not a deadbolt. The little push-button or twist-turn that comes on a bathroom door — the kind with a slot on the outside that opens with a screwdriver, a coin, or the small key that lives on the door frame.

Here is why that one is different from everything else on this page. Police and paramedics open those doors constantly. Somebody has gone down in the bathroom and cannot reach up to the handle — it is one of the most ordinary calls there is. Nobody is going to stand in your hallway wondering what to do about your bedroom door. It is three seconds and they have done it a hundred times. To a stranger in a dark house at two in the morning it is a door that will not open, with no explanation of why.

That is the whole of the trade. You are buying minutes, not resistance. A privacy lock will not hold a door — a shoulder takes it, and anyone who wants through will get through. But he has to reach it, try it, find that it will not turn, and decide what he is going to do about that. Every one of those is time you did not have thirty seconds ago.

Three things worth doing with the minutes, in this order:

• Call first. Before anything else, before you have worked out what is happening. You already know somebody is in the house — that is a car dispatched now rather than when you hear him on the stairs.
• Everybody in the room. Whoever else is in the house comes to you. Nobody goes to look; there is more further down this page on why going to look is the dangerous part.
• Something in your hand. Not to go out and use it — to not be standing there empty-handed and half asleep if that door does come apart. Whatever it is, the point is that it lives in the bedroom with you rather than in the kitchen, which is the side of the door he is on. A bat, a heavy torch, the walking stick, the chair. Most people have never once thought about which side of their own door their own things are on.
• Wake the dog. Not to do anything — only to be heard. The burglars in the Charlotte survey named dogs inside the house alongside alarms and cameras, and a man working at a bedroom door who hears barking and growling on the other side of it has to decide whether he really wants to know what that is. There is a section further down on what a dog is and is not good for, and it does not all point one way.

None of that is a plan to fight anybody, and it should not turn into one. The whole value of the door is that you do not have to go and find out what is on the other side of it — the same rule as the noise at two in the morning, further down. You stay where you are, the police are already coming, and you are simply not going to be caught out standing in the dark with nothing.

That is the entire trade, and most people have never been told it is available to them for the price of a lever handle.

Standing behind that door is not hiding. It is the plan working exactly as designed.

Fern’s nightstand

A neighbor of ours — call her Fern — was seventy and lived on her own. She had a burglar alarm and she did not pay anybody to monitor it, because she had worked out that she did not need to. It went on every night when she went to bed. And beside the bed, all in one place, sat three things.

• Her phone, in a charging stand. Charged every morning, where her hand fell on it in the dark without looking.
• The brightest flashlight she could buy.
• A big can of pepper gel — the gel kind, not the mist.

Her plan was short enough to remember half asleep. Alarm goes off: she calls the police, and she stays in the bedroom. Door locked, gel in one hand, light in the other, both pointed at the door. If that door started to open, the light went straight into his eyes first — a strong light in a dark house leaves a man who was used to the dark seeing nothing at all for a few seconds — and the gel finished the conversation.

She never had to use any of it. But she was seventy years old, and I think she could have pulled it off. That is the point of the story: she was not planning to go and find anybody. Everything she owned for the purpose was pointed at her own bedroom door, from the right side of it, with the police already on their way.

The card in the drawer

Here is the cheapest thing on this whole page, and it might matter more than any of it.

Under stress, a great many people cannot say their own address correctly. They give the old one, transpose the numbers, forget the apartment, leave out the street type — Oak Court and Oak Drive are two different places to a deputy on the way. Your heart is going, somebody is in the house, and the operator needs to hear it right the first time.

So write it down before you need it, on a card that lives in the nightstand drawer next to the phone, and read it out when the time comes:

Reading it off a card saves time, and on that night time is not on your side.

Then tell the operator where you are and stay on the line. The officers coming through your door want to know which room is yours, so nobody mistakes anybody for anybody.

The two-minute walk

A friend of mine, a Marine, had a routine every night of his life, and he taught it to his wife and his children so it did not depend on him. Before bed he walked the house the same way, in the same order, and put his hand on every lock — every outside door, every window, the garage. It took a couple of minutes.

The touching is the whole point, and here is why. A deadbolt can lie to you. You turn it, it stops, and it feels locked. But sometimes it stopped because the bolt hit the edge of the strike plate instead of going into the hole — the door has dropped a little, or swollen in the damp — and it is sitting half out, holding nothing. Most people have done it. So:

• Turn it, then pull the door. Or push it, whichever way it opens. A thrown bolt does not move. A bolt that is resting on the plate lets the door rattle.
• Look at the thumb-turn. Fully across, every time. If it stops short or you have to lean on it, the strike needs adjusting — a small job for a handyman, and one to mention to the landlord if you rent.
• Check the windows you opened today. This is the one that gets all of us as we get older. You let some air in during the afternoon, you closed it when it cooled, and you never thought to turn the latch. Closed is not locked.
• Same order, every night. A route, not a wander. The night you are tired is the night you skip the back bedroom, unless the route is a habit your feet already know.

The batteries, once a year

Make sure every part of the system actually works and is in good shape — the door contacts, the motion sensors, the keypad, the door-and-window alarms, the smoke detectors. Most of that comes down to batteries.

Here is a habit worth stealing. Change every battery in the alarm system once a year, on the same day, whether it needs it or not. Then put the ones that came out in a kitchen drawer, and use them up in the things where a half-spent battery is fine — the flashlight for hunting under the couch cushions, the remote, the kitchen timer. You get the full worth out of every battery you paid for, and the alarm always has the freshest ones in the house. Batteries are not cheap, and nobody wants to throw money away — but the alarm is the last place to be saving it.

And when you buy a system, check how long the panel keeps running after the power is cut. More on that, and why it matters so much, on the alarm page →

The peephole, and the thing that can be bought for it

Almost every front door in the country has one, almost nobody thinks about it, and there is something about it worth knowing.

A device exists that lets somebody standing outside look in through your peephole. It is called a reverse peephole viewer, or a tactical door viewer, and it is a small lens assembly that undoes the optics of an ordinary door viewer — you hold it against the outside of the peephole and the picture comes back the other way. It was originally made for police serving warrants, so an officer could see whether anybody was waiting behind the door before going through it. It is now sold openly to anybody who wants one.

Before that gets frightening, here is the honest size of it, because the scare version is bigger than the real one.

And you do not strictly need the device at all. A peephole passes light both ways, so if the inside of the house is brighter than the porch, somebody close to it can pick up movement through the lens on its own.

The fix is almost free, and there are four versions of it.

What not to do is blind it. Painting over it, plugging it or taking it out is the wrong answer, because the peephole is a safety device and it is doing the most important job on this whole page — letting you find out who is at your door without opening it. Cover it when you are not using it. Do not lose it.

And while you are there, the bigger hole

This one is worth two minutes and almost nobody has checked it. Go outside and try to unscrew the outer ring of your own peephole with your fingers.

On a great many doors it turns. The two halves simply thread together through the door, and on an older or cheaper viewer they can be undone from the outside without a tool. If somebody can unscrew it, what you have is not a peephole with a vulnerability. It is a half-inch hole straight through your front door — and a hole is a great deal more useful to somebody than a narrow lens.

If yours turns, take it out, put a drop of thread-locking compound on the threads, and put it back tight. That is a dollar and ten minutes and it closes the whole subject.

And the same trick belongs in a suitcase. A strip of tape over the peephole of a hotel room door costs nothing, weighs nothing, and settles a question that a lot of people have never thought to ask about a room where they cannot choose the neighbours.

🚗 The Garage — the Hole in Most Houses

You can do everything above to your front door and leave it all undone by a door most people have never thought about once.

The door from the garage into the house is usually a hollow interior door with a knob lock on it. No deadbolt, sometimes no dead latch at all. And it opens into a room with no windows and a door that closes behind you — so a man working on it cannot be seen from the road, cannot be seen from next door, and can take as long as he likes.

And now look at what else is in there with him. Shelves, a workbench, and a pegboard with every tool on it — a pry bar, a hammer, screwdrivers, a saw, a drill, and whatever is in the drawers. A man who gets into your garage has not merely found a room nobody can see into. He has found a fully equipped workshop, and the only thing left between him and your house is a hollow door with a knob lock on it.

He is not hurried any more, either. The one thing every burglar is short of is time in the open, and the moment that overhead door comes down he has as much of it as he wants.

Treat it as an exterior door, because that is what it is. A solid door, a proper deadbolt, and the long screws in the strike plate.

Look for the slide lock, too. Stand inside the garage and look at the door near the bottom, on one side or both. A great many overhead doors have a small slide bolt or a handle-and-bar lock that shoots into a hole in the metal track. Thrown, the door cannot go up — hook the release cord all you like. If yours has none, a garage door company or a handyman can fit one.

🪟 The Windows — Buying Yourself Noise

First-floor windows are about a quarter of break-ins, and glass is the fastest way into a house because it is over in three seconds and it does not need a tool.

Security film does not stop a window breaking. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. What it does is hold the broken pane together in its frame, so the glass does not fall out and leave a hole. The man outside now has to keep hitting it, in the open, making a great deal of noise, for a length of time he has not budgeted for.

That is the same trade as everything else here: you are not buying a wall, you are buying minutes and racket.

While you are at each window, fit a stop or a pin that lets it open four inches for air and no further. A hot night is the reason most ground-floor windows are unlocked, and this settles it without making anybody choose.

Bars on the windows, and the honest word about them

Somewhere in this conversation somebody always lowers their voice and says you could always put bars on, as though it were a slightly shameful idea. It is not, and where I grew up in the San Fernando Valley it was not treated as one. Decorative iron over the windows and a steel security screen door hung ahead of the front door was simply what a house looked like. Millions of American houses look like that today — across the Southwest, through Texas and southern California, and in city neighborhoods in every state. Nobody living behind them thinks of their home as a bunker.

They are also, unlike almost everything else on this page, an actual barrier rather than a delay. Film buys you noise. Planting buys you reluctance. Bars buy you the window not opening.

The one thing you have to get right is the same thing as everywhere else on this page, and there is a clean answer to it. The building code specifically permits bars, grilles, covers and screens over escape windows. The condition it sets is that the device has to be releasable or removable from the inside without a key, without a tool, without special knowledge, and without more force than it takes to open the window normally.

A security screen door is the same bargain at the front of the house and it is the more useful of the two, because you can stand behind a locked steel screen and open the wooden door to talk to whoever knocked. That is the same job the doorbell camera does, done in iron, for people who would rather not have a subscription.

🌵 The Planting — the Cheapest Guard You Will Ever Own

A thorn hedge under a window is a wonderful thing. It never needs a battery, it works in a power cut, it costs nothing to run, and it is beautiful in flower. And getting through it is a slow, noisy, painful business that leaves marks on the person doing it.

This is where a national page has to be careful, because the right plant depends entirely on where you are. Bougainvillea is superb and it is a Gulf and desert plant — it will not live through a winter much north of that. Pick from what grows for you:

• Firethorn (pyracantha) — dense, viciously thorned, orange berries, hardy across most of the country
• Hawthorn — a thorn tree that can be kept as a hedge, tough as anything, very cold hardy
• Barberry — low, dense, spines the whole length of every stem. Check first — it is a listed invasive in a number of states
• Holly — evergreen, so it works in January when the deciduous stuff is bare sticks
• Trifoliate orange — the most fearsome hedge in the South, thorns the length of your thumb
• Climbing roses on a trellis under the window, which nobody ever reads as security

Keep it low, and keep the path clear

Thorns go under the window, not beside the path you walk at night. And keep the whole bed below the sill. A tall shrub near a window cuts both ways — it may be spiky, but it is also a place to stand where nobody can see you working. Under three feet at the wall, and tree branches trimmed up above head height, and you have thorns without cover.

Gravel does the same job by ear. A bed of loose stone under the windows cannot be crossed quietly by anybody, at any hour. Keep it in the beds and off the walkway — deep loose gravel underfoot is exactly the surface that puts an older person on the ground, and a broken hip is a far likelier way to lose your independence than a burglar is.

💡 The Lights — Motion, Not Always-On

A light that burns all night is scenery. Nobody looks at it, nobody notices it, and it helpfully illuminates the ground for whoever is standing on it.

A light that snaps on is an event. It changes something. It makes a person look up from the television next door. And it tells the man in the yard that the house just noticed him, which is the one message worth sending.

So put the money into motion fixtures and aim them properly. Not just at the front door — at the driveway, the side gate, and the ground beside the car.

An honest word about solar

Solar floodlights are excellent on a shed, a gate or a far fence where running a cable is a real job. Be realiztic about them all the same. Their worst performance comes in the short, grey days of midwinter, which is exactly when the nights are longest, and the batteries in cheap units are finished in two or three seasons. On the door you actually rely on, run a wire.

📷 The Cameras — and the Bill That Comes With Them

A camera does three jobs, they are not equally valuable, and almost everybody buys one for the job it does worst.

It deters. The burglars in that survey named cameras alongside alarm signs and dogs as a reason to pick a different house — and a camera does that whether it is recording anything or not.

It lets you answer the door without going to it. This is the one that earns its keep every week, and it is the one nobody buys a camera for. Remember that most of them knock first to find out whether the house is empty. A doorbell camera means the house answers while you are in the back garden, or at your daughter's, or simply not inclined to open the door to a stranger at dusk.

And it collects evidence — which is what they are sold on and the thing they are worst at. A grainy figure in a hood at three in the morning identifies nobody. Buy for the first two. Treat the third as a bonus that will probably never arrive.

One button outside, one telephone anywhere. She does not have to walk to that door, and she does not have to be at home either. The man on the step is running a test — is anybody in? — and it has just come back yes, without her getting out of a chair or standing behind a door deciding whether to open it.

You have found out what is going on without standing up, without crossing the house, and without being anywhere near the door. For anybody over fifty that is not a convenience. It is the point.

And on the tenth time, you know at second five instead of at the crash. Getting into a house takes a man a minute or two of working at a door or a window, and that minute has just become yours. The call is made while he is still working. The difference between a police car sent two minutes ago and one sent when the glass went is very nearly the whole of it.

Or you pick the telephone up off the nightstand and look at the whole yard without moving.

You hear something outside. It is late. And the thing you would otherwise do — get up, cross a dark house, and put your face to a window — is the worst option available at any age, and a genuinely poor one past sixty-five. You are on your feet in the dark, half awake, walking to the one spot in the house that somebody outside would be watching. And when you get there you will see almost nothing.

Here is the use nobody puts in the brochure, and it may be the best one on this page.

The noise at two in the morning

Ask this before you buy anything

Not does it need a subscription. Ask: can I record, review, download and get at the footage I care about without paying every month?

This matters more on a fixed income than any specification on the box. Ring and Nest give you no video history at all without a plan — live view works, alerts work, and anything that happens while you are not watching is gone for good. Ring has no local storage option. Nest has none on any camera it makes. Others, Reolink and Wyze among them, record to a card in the camera and keep their detection features switched on for nothing.

The types, and what each one really costs

• Doorbell camera — does the job above. If somebody buys one thing, this is the thing.
• Battery — goes anywhere, no wiring, and you are up a ladder every few months forever. On a page that has spent this long trying to keep you off ladders, that is a real cost. Cold shortens the interval.
• Solar — same honest caveat as the floodlights: worst in the short grey days of midwinter, which is when the nights are longest.
• Wired, or run to a small recorder — records around the clock, no monthly fee, keeps going in an outage. A proper install job, and the one still working in ten years.
• Floodlight camera — two things you already wanted in one fitting. Needs mains at the eave.
• Cellular — for a gate, a barn, a well house with no wifi. Comes with its own data bill.

Point it at the approach, not at the door

The commonest mistake is a camera aimed at a doorway from four feet away, which gives you an excellent photograph of the top of somebody's hat. Point it down the drive, along the side gate, across the ground beside the car — the places a person crosses on the way in, where they are still upright and still deciding.

By name — two doorbells, two honest trade-offs. No monthly bill: the eufy Video Doorbell E340, about $100. It saves its video on 8 GB of storage built into the doorbell itself, so there is no subscription, and its second, downward camera watches the doormat for packages. It runs on a swappable battery or wires to the existing doorbell transformer, and it can ring the chime you already have. See the eufy E340 → No ladder, lowest price: the Ring Wired Doorbell 2K, about $40, which takes its power from your existing doorbell wiring so it never needs charging. The catch, said plainly: to scroll back and watch what you missed you need a paid Ring subscription; without one you get live view, talk-back and alerts only. See the Ring Wired 2K → Wiring either one to the old doorbell is a short job for an electrician or handyman if you would rather not do it — and if you rent, ask first.

The other one worth having is not outside at all. It is in the garage — because that is the one room on the property where somebody can work unseen, unhurried, and with your own tools in his hands.

Two things that will decide whether you still use it in a year

Set the activity zones on the first day. Every passing car, every cat, forty alerts before lunch — and within a fortnight nobody looks at any of them. A camera you have learned to ignore is an ornament.

And know the law on sound before you switch it on. You need no permit or license to put cameras on your own property in any state, and video of your own porch, drive and perimeter is broadly fine. Audio is where ordinary people break the law without meaning to — wiretapping law is much stricter about sound, and a good many states require consent from everybody recorded.

🪧 The Sign — Cheap, and Worth Exactly What Is Behind It

Not everybody can pay for an alarm company, and the good news is that a burglar never sees the contract. He sees the yard. When the University of North Carolina at Charlotte researchers asked 422 convicted burglars how they picked a house, about 83 per cent said they tried to work out whether there was an alarm before they went in, and about 60 per cent said finding one would send them to a different house altogether. About a quarter said they looked for a security sign as part of sizing a house up. The sign is one of the ways he answers the question he is already asking.

Be clear-eyed about who it stops. In the same survey about four in ten burglars said they mostly acted on impulse — passing by, seeing an easy house, and trying it. That is exactly the man a sign turns away, because there is always a house down the street without one. It will not stop somebody who has watched your house for a week, or somebody too drunk or high to care. It is a nudge, not a lock. Keep the screws, the lights and the bar.

Make the sign true — for about $25

Here is the trick that costs least and leaves you nothing to be uneasy about: put a real alarm behind the sign. A pack of battery door-and-window contact alarms screams when a door or window opens, and a wedge alarm under the bedroom door screams when somebody pushes it. Neither needs a monthly bill. With those fitted, a sign that says the house has an alarm is simply telling the truth. See the UltraPro 4-pack contact alarms → · See the SABRE wedge alarm → The full rundown of what an alarm can and cannot do is on the home alarm systems page.

Generic, never somebody else’s logo

Do not put up a sign or sticker carrying the name of an alarm company you do not pay. Experienced burglars know those signs get sold online and left behind when people cancel, the companies treat their names and logos as their property, and New Jersey lawmakers have gone as far as proposing to make selling them a criminal offense. A plain sign that says the house is protected by an alarm, or that cameras are recording, does the same job without any of that. By name: Psyfer’s fade-free alarm window stickers, made in the USA, six to a pack. See the Psyfer window stickers → If you do have a camera, a reflective “24 hour video surveillance” yard sign on a stake. See the video surveillance yard sign →

Where they go

One sign by the front walk where it can be read from the street. A sticker on the glass beside every outside door — including the back door and the slider, because a man who has walked round the back has already decided the front was too visible. And keep them clean and upright: a faded sign leaning in a flower bed says the opposite of what you meant.

🐕 The Dog — an Alarm With an Opinion

When the Charlotte researchers asked four hundred and twenty-two convicted burglars what made them look at a house and keep walking, a dog inside came back in the same short list as alarm signs, alarms and outdoor cameras. It belongs on this page for that reason alone.

What the dog is actually doing is making noise, and that is worth more than it sounds. A bark tells you — the same head start the camera buys — tells the neighbors, and tells him he has been noticed, which is the one thing every burglar in that survey was trying to avoid. So size matters far less than voice. A big quiet dog in a back bedroom does nothing. A ten-pound dog that will not shut up does the whole job from behind a closed door.

If you have a good enough dog, let it sleep in your room — its own bed, on the floor, with the bedroom door closed. That dog is going to raise as much hell as the alarm. Now picture it from the other side of the door. The siren is screaming. A dog is barking its head off. And somebody in the back room is shouting that the police have been called. That is a man with a great deal on his mind, and every bit of it is pointing him back out the way he came.

A dog after fifty — companion first, alarm second →

👀 Looking Lived In — and What the Street Can See

Most burglars knock first. It is not boldness, it is arithmetic — they want to know whether anybody is home, and the doorbell answers it for free.

Which makes a video doorbell one of the most useful hundred dollars on this page, and not for the recording. It is useful because the house answers. You can be at your daughter's and still say "yes?" through the speaker, and the test he came to run has failed.

Alongside it, the unglamorous things that say somebody lives here and is paying attention: mail and newspapers stopped before any trip or any hospital stay, a lamp and a radio on a timer, and one neighbor who has your key and your telephone number. That neighbor is free and beats everything else on this page.

After dark, a lit room with the curtains open is a display case

This is the one nobody thinks about, and it is worth walking outside tonight to see for yourself. From a dark street, a lit window with the curtains open is a lit stage. Everything in the room can be studied at leisure, from the pavement, by anybody, for as long as they care to stand there — what you own, where you keep it, which door leads where, and whether you are alone in the house.

The same window, the same night. Open, it is a lit stage and anybody in the dark can study it for as long as they like — what you own, where it is, which door goes where, and whether there is anyone else in the house. Closed, it says the one thing you want it to say and nothing else.

Closed, that same window says the one thing you actually want it to say: somebody is home.

Which is really an argument about neighbors rather than about hardware, and it is worth reading one that actually happened. The yard two doors down is about the house on a street that nobody was watching, and what the people either side of it noticed too late.

🅿️ The Driveway — the Two Minutes Nobody Writes About

Almost every page like this one is about the house while you are out. Practically none of them cover the part where you are getting out of the car, and that is the part where an older person is most exposed: hands full, attention divided, back to the street, in the dark, at a place and time anybody watching the house could have predicted.

It is also the easiest thing on this page to fix, because none of it costs anything.

• Light the car, not just the door. Most driveway lighting stops where the pavement starts and leaves the vehicle in the dark.
• Back in, or park facing out. Costs nothing, and means leaving is one movement.
• Keys in your hand before you open the door. Not hunted for in a bag under a dome light.
• Do not sit sorting things out with the door open. Get out, close it, and sort the bags at the house.
• If you have a garage: pull in, put the door down, and get out then. In that order, every time.

🧾 Eight More That Cost Almost Nothing

These turn up on nearly every list put together by police crime-prevention officers, and none of them needs more than an afternoon.

Ask for a free home security survey

Many police departments will send a crime-prevention officer to walk around your house — doors, locks, windows, lighting and planting — and hand you a written list of fixes, nearly all of them cheap. It usually costs nothing and takes under an hour. Call your police or sheriff’s non-emergency number and ask whether they do “home security surveys.” Not every department does, but it is a five-minute call to find out.

Make your house number easy to read at night

When you call 911, the officer or the ambulance crew has to find your door in the dark. Numbers at least 4 inches tall, in a color that stands out from the wall and lit or reflective, save minutes when minutes count. Put them where they can be read from the street, and on the mailbox too if the house sits back.

No spare key under the mat

The doormat, the flowerpot, the fake rock and the top of the door frame are the first places anybody looks. If a family member or a neighbor may need to get in, give them a key — or fit a small combination lockbox, the kind this page already suggests for emergency access.

Put a latch guard on the lock

A latch guard is a metal plate that covers the gap between the door and the frame where the lock sits, so nobody can work a pry bar or a card in there. Seattle Police put the cost at about $12. It suits outward-opening doors and doors with a loose fit.

Don’t advertise the new TV

The box from a new television or computer, left at the curb, tells everybody driving past what is inside. Cut it down and put it in the recycling bin, or keep it in the garage until collection day.

Lock away the ladder and the tools

A ladder lying by the house reaches the second-floor windows nobody locks. A pry bar left in the yard saves a burglar bringing his own. Put them in the shed or garage and lock it.

Record what you own

Walk through every room with your phone recording, open the closets and drawers, and say out loud what things are. Write down the serial numbers of the TV, computers, tools and anything else that has one. Keep a copy somewhere other than the house. If the worst happens, that video and list are what turn a police report into something they can work with.

Don’t post that you’re away

Photos from the beach can wait until you are home. A post that says the house is empty for a week reaches more people than you think. Tell the one neighbor who is watching the house instead.

🧰 What to Leave to Somebody Else

Most of this page is a screwdriver and an afternoon. Some of it is not, and there is no credit for doing those yourself.

• Anything on a ladder above single-story height. A floodlight is not worth a fall.
• New wiring for a hardwired fixture, unless you have done that work before.
• Cutting a new deadbolt into a door — the boring has to be square or the lock binds, and a lock that is stiff is a lock that stops being thrown.
• Anything on a door you rent. Ask first, in writing.

📋 Why This Belongs on the Fifty List

Every one of these jobs is a job for a man or woman of fifty-five. Digging a bed. Driving four inch screws into a stud. Getting up a ladder to a floodlight. Kneeling on a concrete garage floor to fit a deadbolt.

At seventy-five every one of them is a telephone call, a quote, and a stranger's afternoon at whatever the rate is that year.

And notice that not one thing on this page is bought only against the rare bad day. The motion light stops you falling. The gravel drains the bed. The long screws stop the door rattling every time the wind gets up. The thorn hedge is in flower in May and full of birds by August. The neighbor with your key is the person who notices when your car has not moved in two days.

You are not buying insurance against something that probably will not happen. You are buying a handful of things that earn their keep every ordinary week — and that happen to also cover it. More on the telephone and the screen →