Your front door is not the only way in: 8 free fixes that make your home a harder target

1. Walk round your own house from the outside and ask how you would get in

1. Go out to the pavement or the end of the drive and look at the house the way a stranger does — in the evening, with the lights on. The man Good Housekeeping calls an ex-burglar gives exactly this instruction: stand outside your own property and think, how would I get in? 3
2. Start at the front door. Is it lit, and can you be seen from the street while you stand at it? A hedge, a porch or a thick planting scheme that hides the doorway gives a burglar somewhere to work unobserved, so clear the sightline. 4
3. Walk round the back and hunt for the ladder you have accidentally provided: a wheelie bin, a fence, a drainpipe, a trellis, a flat roof, a shed, a trampoline, a balcony, a neighbour's extension or scaffolding. Upper-floor windows become attractive the moment anything makes them reachable. 1 The apartment break-in Apartment Therapy's writer lived through started with a builder's new roof extension that put their second-floor windows a step ladder away from the street. 5
4. Note every window you cannot see from where you are standing, and every one that is open. A small bathroom window left open for air is a way in — the ex-burglar climbed to one using a wheelie bin as a ladder, then jumped down to the kitchen worktop. 6
5. Write the list down. Mark which items cost nothing and can be dealt with tonight.

2. Lock the doors you skip, and use both locks when you are in

1. Count the locks on the front and back doors. "Opportunists will look at a row of houses, and if they only have one lock on the front door, you know you're going to get into that place," says the ex-burglar. 3 A second lock on each outside door is the first thing worth having.
2. Use both, every time — including when you are in, and including a trip to the bins. A burglar leans on the door with a foot to feel how many locks are in play, so a house that only locks up at night is unlocked at the hours most burglaries happen. 3 Most burglaries happen in daylight, when the house is likely to be empty. 1
3. Lock the openings you do not think of as doors: the back door, the side gate, the garage door, the small bathroom window, the window over the extension. When Good Housekeeping asked what people forget before going away, these are the ones that come back. 8
4. Check that the latch engages. A lock that can be slipped with a shim or a credit card is a latch without a dead-latch mechanism, and a proper one is what stops that trick. 1
5. Build the habit rather than relying on the memory: say the short list out loud at the door, or set a recurring reminder for the hour you usually leave. 7 If you live in a block of flats, this includes the communal door you are tempted to prop open for the delivery driver.

3. Put the spare key somewhere a burglar does not look first

1. Take the key out of the known hiding places: under the mat, the fake rock, the plant pot, the top of the door frame, the meter box. Do not hide a key anywhere near the door, because a cursory check is all it takes. 4
2. Look at what the letterbox can reach. Keys left on a hook or a table by the door can be hooked out through the slot with a stick; so can a handbag. A guard or cage fitted to the inside of the letterbox ends the trick. 3
3. Give the spare to a neighbour or a friend within walking distance instead, and keep the key ring unlabelled. A set marked with the address, or filed as "next door", tells whoever finds it which door it opens. 6
4. Remember the car. Keys left in a car, and car keys on the same ring as your door keys, are the same hiding problem with a bigger reward: police advise keeping the car locked even when it is parked in the garage, because burglars look inside it for keys. 1
5. If you rent and have just moved in, ask the landlord in writing whether the locks were re-keyed since the last tenant. 7

4. Fix the two things that actually give way: the strike plate and the window

1. Look at the metal plate the bolt slides into on the door frame — the strike plate. If it is held by two short screws into the softwood trim, that trim can be torn away with a firm kick. Replace the plate with a heavy-duty four-screw version and drive 3-inch screws through it into the stud behind the frame. 1
2. Put one long screw in each hinge as well, and check the hinge side of the door is on the inside. Hinges on the outside let the door be lifted off. 7
3. Check the bolt. A deadbolt should throw about an inch of itself into the frame, and a good cylinder is bevelled so that pliers cannot shear it off. Deeper screws also make a hinge harder to tear out. 4
4. On a sliding patio door, do not trust the latch. A wooden dowel or an adjustable bar laid in the track stops the door sliding; screws half-driven into the upper track of a horizontal window, or a pin through the frame, stop the panel being lifted off its track; and the rollers should be adjusted so there is no lift to exploit. 1
5. Treat every window the same way, because windows have latches rather than locks and are left unlocked more often than doors. A dowel in the track of a horizontal slider, a pin through the frame of a vertical one, and no more than six inches of opening for ventilation, with nothing within reach that can be used to open the door. 1 For a window you want to keep open for air, a folding wedge lock holds it wide enough to breathe and too narrow to climb through. 10

5. Take your own break-in equipment out of the garden and the garage

1. Lock the shed, and treat it as the front door of a second house if it holds tools or ladders. The ex-burglar's summary of what burglars love is an unlocked shed full of tools and even ladders — no need to carry your own equipment. 6
2. Move everything climbable away from the walls: the wheelie bin, garden furniture, the barbecue, the trampoline, the ladder, and any trellis fixed to the wall. Keep trees trimmed back from upper windows, because anything that reaches a window turns it into a ground-floor window. 10
3. Deal with the garage door. Hang a blanket or a film over its glass panels so nobody can see or watch through them, keep the car inside it locked, and take the remote off the sun visor or out of the glovebox and put it on your keys — a car is easier to break into than a house, and a remote left in it is a way in. 110
4. Deal with the manual release on an automatic garage door. The cord that lets you open the door by hand during a power cut can be fished for and pulled with a wire coat hanger from outside. A barrier fitted between the release and the door, or a small zip tie threaded through the release, blocks the trick. 10
5. Test the release afterwards, by hand. A zip tie is strong enough to defeat a piece of wire and weak enough to break when you pull the cord properly, and the worst time to find out which it is, is a power cut. 10

6. Make the house look occupied at the hours that matter

1. Going out for the evening: leave a light on in an upstairs room, and leave the television or the radio on. Most burglars will not risk a house where somebody might be in. 6
2. Draw the blinds and curtains at night on the downstairs windows, and set venetian flaps downwards. A lit front room you can read from the street is a showroom; the ex-burglar reads a visible calendar through a kitchen window as a diary of when the house is empty. 36
3. Going away for longer: put lamps on timer switches, and stagger them. A smart plug you already own does this from your phone; a mechanical timer does it without one, and two or three lights on different schedules look less like a machine than the same three lamps every evening. 8
4. Clear the tells. Bins left out long after collection, mail and newspapers piling up, parcels stacked at the door, and the second car missing from its usual place are all the same message in different forms. Ask one neighbour to take the bins in and watch the front, and leave a car in its usual spot if there is one. 810
5. Do not broadcast the trip. Post the photographs when you are back, not while the house is standing empty — even a private account is a place where dates travel. 8
6. If there is a drive, park the car facing the house with the wheels turned. A burglar would much rather make a quick getaway than reverse out, so a car parked helpfully facing the road makes your neighbour the more attractive target. 6

7. Photograph the house and write down what you own

1. Walk room to room with the phone and photograph each one, including the inside of cupboards and drawers where the valuables actually live, while everything is in its usual place. 3
2. Photograph the serial-number plates on the things that have them — laptops, televisions, bikes, tools, instruments — or write the numbers down. 3
3. Keep the record somewhere the house is not: a cloud account, an email to yourself, or the file your insurance documents live in. A list that exists only on the phone in the house goes missing with the phone.
4. Read the policy once. Renters' policies typically cover burglary, and if you rent and have never looked, that is the paragraph to check. 7

8. Be the neighbour who notices

1. Know who lives on either side and opposite, and exchange the useful facts rather than the small talk: who is away, when the bins go out, whether a car should be on the drive. Talking to your neighbours is the original home security system and most landlords take security seriously too. 7
2. Learn what a house being watched looks like, because burglars do case houses. Four things are worth acting on: a car parked in the same spot with somebody sitting in it, an occupied one with different people in it on different days, or people in it who appear to be watching; strangers coming to the door with a reason to get inside; small damage nobody has fixed, such as a broken pane or outdoor bulbs that have been unscrewed; and things left on the property as a test of attention, such as a flyer on the porch, tape across a door, or a mat flipped over. 11
3. Deal with each of them the same day. Bring the flyer in, replace the bulb, board or repair the pane, and report the pattern — particularly the parked car — to the police non-emergency line rather than only to the household group chat. 11
4. If you see a break-in happening, call the emergency number. If you come home to one, do not go in and do not confront anybody: the camera that recorded it is worth more than anything you could do in the doorway. 5