Sleep Better Tonight with These Home Security Tips
When you go to bed at night, do you stare at the ceiling and wonder if the front door is locked? Maybe your kids have been going in and out of the garage and you hope they remembered to close the garage door. Or my personal favorite, “Did I remember to arm the alarm system?”
The picture above looks like a nightmare, right? We'll if we stare up at that ceiling for too long all sorts of ideas and scenarios can run through our minds and rob us of sleep. If this happens to you, then you need to take control of your home's security.
All of these thoughts are normal. Trust me, I’ve thought all of these things. So how do I fall asleep at night if I think about all of this stuff that could go wrong? I want to share with you what I did a long time ago out of necessity.
I developed a secure habit I call the nightly safety sweep.
The nightly safety sweep is nothing new. Dads have been doing this for a long time. But I’m intentional about doing it and making it better every day. And this is something I’ve advocated for since I started The Secure Dad.
This is a secure habit that we need to make part of our daily lives. We’re not always going to be mentally sharp. There will be days when we feel brain dead and thinking about our safety is going to be diminished. But if we develop secure habits then when we move through the motions of our day, we’ll default to our habits which include making our families safer.
So what is the Nightly Safety Sweep?
The nightly safety sweep is when you check the basic security measures of your home at the end of the day. And you do this everyday that you can. If you’re not there to do it, you appoint another adult in your home to conduct the sweep in your absence. This habit will pay off.
Cover the Basics
The first thing you want to check is all of your exterior doors. Remember in the majority of home invasions, the intruder enters through a door. So check to make sure the doors are closed properly.
Are the deadbolts and knob locks actually locked? Do you add any secondary door security like an adjustable security bar or a floor mounted lock?
And don’t forget your biggest exterior door, your garage door. If you leave the door up it’s an open invitation for anyone to take what they want from your garage. At 2am it doesn’t take a master thief to walk in, pick up your toolbox and walk out. A high teenager can do that. Don’t make it easy for them, make sure the garage door is shut.
Have you had any windows opened during the day? Check to make sure they’re all locked. In my area a few years back a cleaning crew would come to their customers homes and when they left they’d make sure one window of the home was unlocked.
Then later, when the homeowners were away, friends of the cleaning crew would enter through the unlocked window and rob the home. So if you’ve had a service person in your home, double check the window locks.
Deterrence
As part of your nightly safety sweep, we need to make sure that our exterior lights are working to deter a would-be thief. We want to make our homes look like a hard target, lighting is a simple way to do that.
To help illuminate your home at night, install dawn to dusk bulbs that will automatically come on when it gets dark and shut off when the sun comes up.
Don’t Give it all Away
And finally, make sure you arm your alarm system. You can have the best alarm in the world and if you don’t arm it, it does you no good.
I had the pleasure of being on Byron Rogers’ Podcast, The Executive Protection Lifestyle Podcast and Byron brought up that you can make the best plans, buy the best alarm system and be ready to go. But if you don’t arm it, you’re giving the whole thing away!
So let’s avoid this simple mistake and develop a secure habit to check our home’s basic defenses every night.
If you’d like to know more about protecting your home, read my book Home Security: The Secure Dad’s Guide. In it you’ll learn more about the nightly safety sweep, including the scary story of my biggest mistake in protecting my home. This memory still gives me anxiety at night sometimes.
Plus you’ll discover the layered home defense strategy that will make your home a hard target day and night. Get your copy of Home Security: The Secure Dad’s Guide today.
