Before my neighbors were burglarized a couple weeks ago, I really was not in tune to {simple} ways you can make your house less of a target for a thief to break-in.

After all that happened, I was so shaken up and downright scared! Mainly, it unnerved me because I am a stay-at-home-mom, home during a good portion of most days with my girls and the thought of anyone attempting to break-in my house left my MamaBear radar on HIGH alert.

I imagined a scenario of robbers entering my home as I am there with my girls and me pleading with them to just let me grab my girls and leave and then they can have a field-day in my home.

Fortunately, these crooks DO, for the most part, want a house that is empty of humans and full of valuables.

That did give me some assurance, but still.

I wanted to know how we can best protect our home from burglars. So what does any OCD person do? They become obsessed about the topic and research ways to protect the house, come up with a list to present to their husband, have their husband tell them what is rational and what is not, do some of the things and then ultimately leave their safety and the safety of their precious girls in the Lord’s hands.

So I thought I would share my research, because odds are a lot of you out there probably haven’t even thought about this stuff if you haven’t been burglarized yourself or lived through it with your next-door neighbor!

This isn’t to scare you silly (like I was…). It is simply knowledge that you can take and possibly prevent your home from being burglarized.

Prevention is so SMART, in my opinion. And these tips are so simple (and most of them are cheap…it can get expensive, but there are cheap ways to help protect your home).

But first…some Burglary stats:

Burglarizing a house is a Crime of Opportunity and there IS something you can do about that!

1. Lock your doors and windows. Simple, right?! Lock them when you are home and when you leave. Leaving doors unlocked is an EASY way for robbers to gain access into your home and these people are looking for the path of least resistance. Be aware of the garage door too. If you aren’t out in the garage, leave it closed. Open garages are an easy way to gain access to your home.

2. Cut back shrubs. Big bushes/trees near your home are an excellent way for burglars to hide while attempting to break into your home.

Check this bush out:

That is my next door neighbor’s house and the thieves entered their house through a side bedroom window that was nicely hidden by this huge bush!

3. Make your home seem lived in. Don’t let mail accumulate in the mailbox or newspapers accumulate on the driveway. And don’t let those annoying little brochures that the Chinese restaurants leave sticking our your front door accumulate either. All of those are signs to a thief that there has not been much activity there lately.

4. Let your presence be known if someone knocks on your door. The thieves want easy access into the house and they also want to make sure no one is home. Many will even knock on the door before breaking in just to see if you are home. If someone knocks and you are home, make sure they know you are home. They will probably make up some story that they are doing a survey or something and then move on to their next target. I know that I have ignored people at my front door before! Never again. I will now always go to the door and yell, “Sorry, not interested!” and then make sure they leave my property.

5. Leave a radio on when you leave your home. If a thief comes to the door to knock and see if someone is home, hearing a radio or TV may make them get out of there before they even knock to see if someone is there because the radio makes them infer the house is occupied. I now have a radio set up near our front door. If I leave during the day, I turn it on. Funny story: I can remember my dad leaving a radio on in our house LOUD when we would go off on vacation. I thought that was so dumb and he was just paranoid! Ha! Funny how that happens…

6. Install motion lights. These are obviously more for night-protection. We installed one on the front of our house and one in the back yard. These are good for a startle effect. Someone approaches your house in the dark and sets off the motion light and then suddenly they aren’t so hidden anymore! Funny thing here is that now when they go off at night, I jump up to see “who is out there prowling my house?” because these motion lights can be set off by animals, too. Kinda creepy, but at least when you look out, it’s light and you can see what, if anything(one) is out there!

7. Put a lamp on a timer inside your home. Nothing says you aren’t home more than a dark house at 8pm (unless, I guess your whole household is in bed by 8pm. That is not the case here!). But if you put a lamp to turn on before it gets dark (so it is not obvious the light turns on at the same time everyday), once it is dark it appears someone is home because the lights are on.

8. If you have a dog that is a barker that is a plus. Although, I must say, my next-door neighbors have TWO yappy dogs that bark their heads off when you come to the door and it obviously didn’t run those thieves away that day. But, almost every thing I read about how to protect your home from a burglar says “get a dog”. Check. We do have one of those. And she barks an annoying, loud bark every time a leaf falls from a tree.

9. Hide your valuables in unsuspecting places. If the thieves do get in, their number one stop is usually the master bedroom. It sure was in both of my neighbor’s homes. The master bedroom in both houses was literally turned upside down as the thieves went through every drawer & cabinet looking for valuables. One neighbor had a safe in the master closet that they attempted to break into. When they were having difficulties getting in, they ended up throwing a blanket over the safe and hauling it out the front door and into their car! After all that, I am not so sure a safe is the safest way to go. We don’t have one, but I guess for those of you that do, it is strongly suggested that you put it somewhere else in your house besides the master bedroom. I am currently thinking of where I am going to put all of our personal information. I have an idea and I think it’s a good one!

10. Get an alarm system. 90% of convicted burglars agree that they will simply pass a home that has a security alarm. Some one was obviously watching my neighbors’ homes that were broken into. I have to wonder if they were watching ours too and decided it wasn’t a good target because we do have an alarm system and there is someone home every day. We had basic monitoring before all this happened but now we have a motion detector and glass break sensors in all three bedrooms, in the living room and in the master bathroom. The motion detector is like the heartbeat of any good alarm system because it catches motion in the main traffic areas of your home when you are away. The glass break sensors automatically sound the alarm if a window is broken. The way these thieves entered my neighbors’ houses, the alarm would not have sounded even if turned on because they did not open the window (or door) to get in – they broke the glass of the sliding glass door on the first house and broke the glass of the bedroom window on the next-door neighbor’s house.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, these were just not things that were on my thinking radar before my neighbors’ houses were broken into. But now it is something I (we) think about and there are so many simple things homeowners can do to protect their homes!

I guess my hope in taking the time to write this is that someone will read and be proactive about this before they fall victim to this crime.

We DO NOT need to live in fear. Trust me. I did that for one day (the day after this happened and I was home alone with the girls all day) and it was not fun. I was constantly on edge and felt like I could not relax in my own home at all! Dave came home that day and I lost it! I just lost my cool and had to go into our bedroom to calm down. It wasn’t until then that I realized how tense I had been all day and the stress and worry of it all had come crashing down on me and I knew then I was living in fear…and it was affecting my entire family negatively.

God has NOT given us a spirit of fear. But He has given us a brain to be smart about things and take measures to prevent becoming the next statistic! So I channeled my paranoia into being proactive about protecting my home.

And that is all this post is about! Protect your homes, okay?!

- Elaine