Who needs a Home Security System?
Everyone that’s who! I say this because we had a potentially dangerous situation happen in our house, and we didn’t even know about it at the time! Going back around 13 months ago now we had someone force a locked garage roller door open enough to gain access to our garage, which is attached to our home. The person was able to move into the foyer area where he found a handbag and made off with it.
The scary thing is that the foyer area leads directly to a set of internal stairs and access to the rest of our house. This all happened while we were at home, during daylight hours and when out three kids were home with us. While we live in what I would consider to be a ’safe’ area with a relatively low crime rate and our house is clearly visible to traffic passing by, it just goes to show that if the person is desperate enough they will get in.
Now this is where this experience gets scary, although slightly amusing. We had no idea at the time that this was occurring and the first we knew of it was when two Police officers showed up at our front door and asked if anything had been taken from the house recently. My answer was no, not that I was aware of. They then went on to say that a person they has caught stealing from another address had admitted to breaking into our house and taking a handbag and had described the foyer area and stairs in detail to the officers.
My wife was at work at the time so I said I would ask her when she got home if she knew of anything missing and give them a call. When Belinda arrived home I asked her about the missing handbag and she said “Yeah, I know the one, Mikaela (our five year old daughter) plays with it and I thought she had put it somewhere.” Turns out the handbag was a toy and had around fifty cents of change in it and nothing else. We phoned the Police and they said that even though it was pretty much worthless he would still be charged with breaking and entering and stealing. What a clown, I wonder what he bought with the fifty cents?
Humor aside, this event made us make some serious changes to our security level in our home. I shudder to think what could of happened if he had gone looking for more and found his way up the stairs to where myself, Belinda and the kids were probably sitting down watching T.V. or something like that. Who knows what could have happened. Needless to say the garage doors now have Automatic Controllers on them which act as another lock and motion detectors have been installed in the garage as well.
So please don’t think it won’t happen to you, I hope it never does, but I thought we were safe and had enough security measures in place and as it turns out we weren’t even close to having enough home security. So what measures can be taken to improve our security in our homes? In the next couple of posts I will endeavour to answer this question in detail so you too can be safe from the ‘fifty cent handbag thieves’ of this world. To start with please see the Home Security Basics post.