What Are the Top 5 Easiest Entry Points to Your Home?
You can spend hours online reading all sorts of articles talking about how to prevent burglary and home invasion. The articles offer all sorts of suggestions covering everything from keeping your windows and doors locked to installing a full home security system complete with video surveillance coverage. But let us back up to the starting point: the entry points to your home.
Before you lay out any type of home security plan, whether it includes a security system or not, it is important to figure out how burglars or home invaders would attempt to get into your home. Why? Because the weakest entry points are the ones that need hardening. If you don’t address the weak points, they continue to leave you vulnerable.
Take a step back and think about it right now. Among all the entry points to your home, which five are the easiest through which to get in? Another way to look at it is to consider the top five weakest lines of defense your home has against unauthorized intrusion.
1. The Front Door
The remainder of this post will discuss five entry points common to American homes. They are not listed in any particular order, so don’t make any such assumptions. The first one on our list is the front door. Believe it or not, front doors consistently rank as one of the most popular choices for burglars and home invaders due to their weakness as security devices.
Flimsy doors with equally flimsy locks make forced entry easier. Worse yet, burglars are smart enough to know that people are careless about keeping the front door locked. They actually roam through neighborhoods checking doors. If they find one that is unlocked, they walk right in.
2. The Garage Door
Burglars and home invaders also appreciate open garage doors because they know the chances of the door leading from the garage into the house being secured with the deadbolt are pretty slim. In many cases, that particular door isn’t even a heavy-duty exterior door. It is a flimsy interior door that oftentimes only has a single handle lock on it.
3. Sliding Glass Doors
Sliding glass doors are problematic for several reasons. First of all, according to Vivint Smart Home, factory-installed flip locks typical of sliding glass doors are easily breached by burglars with an inexpensive hand tool. Second, sliding glass doors are easy to break with a hammer and hole punch.
Vivint recommends installing a specially designed deadbolt lock for sliding glass doors. They also recommend a security rod in the lower track and, if you have a home security system, a contact sensor on the door.
4. The Rear Door
Houses without rear patios still tend to have rear doors. In some cases, the rear door is a first-floor door that opens into the kitchen. Other times it is a door at the bottom of a staircase opening into the basement. In either case, rear doors are as easy to breach as front doors and have the advantage of limited view.
5. First-Floor Windows
While windows are not the preferred entry point for burglars, they will look for unlocked first-floor windows if all the doors are locked. A window left unlocked is easily slid open, and that’s that.
Burglars and home invaders can be very creative about how they break in. As a homeowner yourself, the most important thing you can do to protect yourself and your family is to think like a criminal thinks. Then harden the weak spots that make unauthorized entry too easy.