Whether you have bought a new apartment or house, you shouldn’t have to lose your hard-earned savings to keep your home and valuables safe. Since it is inadvisable to keep your home without even the basic protection, you will have to adopt a few ways to keep your home safe. However, you don’t need to break your bank account to do that.
You may think of state-of-the-art devices when someone says home security systems, but those are expensive. Even if you have the budget to buy those security systems, you can’t ignore the basic protective ways to keep your home safe. In this article, you will know more about these free or inexpensive ways to keep your home safe from burglars, thieves, and intruders of any kind.
These are some of the most inexpensive and basic ways to keep your house from getting robbed.
Contents
Keep Your Windows And Doors Locked
You would have, of course, heard the phrase that says good habits go a long way. According to statistics, most home break-ins point towards the fact that burglars look for easy targets. It is also a fact that most burglaries occur between 10 am and 3 pm. Studies show that an average burglary only takes 8 to 10 minutes to complete. Around 23% of burglars enter through a window, mostly the first-floor window, and 34% enter through the front door itself. Thus, it would be best if you kept in mind not to be an easy target. To prevent that, always keep your windows and door locked, even if you are not away.
Update Your Locks Regularly
If you haven’t changed your locks for quite some time now, you need to conduct a basic survey. That would include questions about damaged locks or if any stranger has extra keys to your place. You should also inspect if they are any locks that are easy to pick and open. If you find that the answer to such questions is usually “yes,” you must consider changing your locks and get new tamper-proof locks. It would also be a great idea to install ANSI Grade 1 or Grade 2 deadbolts on all your exterior doors.
Reinforce Windows, Doors, Hardware, And Locks
Suppose you have now secured your locks and updated them too, but there is a chance that your windows and doors might be weak and flimsy. In that case, anyone could break in easily and rob your home. To prevent that from happening, you should minutely inspect all the points of entry into your house, especially the ones on the first floor. Then you must repair the doors and windows as required and reinforce them. Here are the things you could do:
- Consider replacing all the exterior doors that are hollow-core, thin, or broken. You could also add additional protection by a security bar or a door barricade.
- For door hardware, you should ensure that the strike place, which is the place in which the bolt of the door enters when closed, is installed properly and has screws that are three-fourths of an inch in length. This length is ideal as nobody can force the bolt open in this case. You could buy a door reinforcement kit, too, if you think the hardware or the strike plates of any door needs to be reinforced or repaired.
- It would be best to add an auxiliary foot lock if you have sliding doors in your house, especially on the first floor. You could also place a dowel in the tracks of the sliding door to stop the doors from being forcibly opened.
- For windows, you should add bars, window locks, and other such protective measures to prevent anyone from breaking in.
Use Motion-Sensing Lights Both Outside And Inside
A great and inexpensive way to alert intruders is to turn all the lights in your house into motion-sensing ones. You could also screw in a motion-detecting adapter in a regular bulb and socket. Outside your home, these lights will put anyone snooping around your property in the limelight. That visibility alone would be enough to ward off burglars in most cases. Even if they do break inside your home, the indoor lights will scare them off as they won’t be able to move around undetected with the lights on.
Be Smart About Your Hiding Place For Keys
One of the worst things you could do to jeopardize the safety of your home and valuables is not choosing a good hiding place for your keys. A predictable place for hiding keys would give easy access to your home to any intruder. Since all burglars are opportunistic and search for the easiest way into a house, you must be clever when hiding your keys. If you have trusted neighbors, you could give an extra key to them for safekeeping, find unexpected hiding places for your keys, and keep changing them. You could also pick up an affordable combination lockbox in which you can keep your keys. A little alertness goes a long way.
Never Keep Your Valuables Lying About
This goes without saying that you should never keep your valuables lying about even inside your home. You should be careful about keeping your tools and vehicles like bikes safe and locked up in the garage if you are outside. It would be best if you opted for putting blinds or curtains on your windows to stop anyone from spotting easy access into your home when you are inside. As said earlier, you should keep your valuables like electronics, cash, jewelry, and important documents out of sight.
Conclusion
Besides the above tips, you could invest in cameras for wide surveillance outside your home to keep track of any suspicious activity or persons. Even if you can’t afford a camera, you could install fake ones to hoodwink any possible intruders. If you have the budget, some of the basic safety items that would be best to invest in are smart locks, DIY home security systems, video doorbells, etc.
