Safety First! Keep Your Stylish Home Safe with These Easy Security Boosting Ideas

Your glamorous home looks just as good to thieves – here’s a few easy ways to stop them in their tracks for good!

Home security doesn’t always mean cameras and invisible fences. Sometimes homes are simply born more secure than others with a great design that repels burglars. If you’re planning a renovation, or if you’re shopping around for a new home, we’ve got some features for you to keep in mind. These range from accessories to landscaping, and many can be applied to existing houses as well.

Keep Things Bright

Shadowy streets and driveways are incredibly inviting to anyone planning to case your house for valuables. The lurking robber isn’t just a cliché – anyone with designs on your belongings will have a much easier time avoiding detection if they can stay in the dark while approaching your house. 

So light things up. Map out obvious approaches to your home, and ensure that they’re covered by at least some lighting. More subtle avenues – such as a back yard with an easily-jumped fence – should also be considered.

External floodlights are your friends when you’re looking to shed a large amount of light on a large area. Think about using them to cover wide driveways or walks, just make sure not to aim them directly into neighbors’ windows. Motion-activated lights are also handy. Not only do they conserve power at night, but they’re also an intimidating surprise for anyone they catch off-guard.

Have an Open Landscape

Similarly, do your best to eliminate easy cover around your house. Eyes, both yours and your neighbors, are the most effective deterrents against theft. Anything that can shelter a burglar against them can pose a problem to home security.

While we don’t want you completely leveling your yard, consider strategically getting rid of certain elements. If a low hedge totally covers ground-level windows, it also covers someone attempting to break into those windows. If you do want to keep trees and hedges, don’t let them grow too close to your house, and ensure that they still see plenty of night-time illumination.

Hang Curtains and Blinds 

TVs and electronics behind an uncovered window can catch attention from even a completely innocent passer-by, particularly if you’re the type to watch TV at night. Make sure to hang black-out curtains and roller blinds to keep these things out of sight at night time as well as when you leave home.

Covering up and confusing the layout of your home can make it much more difficult for a prospective thief to detect your belongings, greatly reducing any incentive they might have to stage a risky break-in. Do yourself a favor – pick up some fully folding, venetian-style blinds, or a set of non-translucent curtains, to stop living in a fishbowl.

Location, Location, Location

And now we come to the one thing that really can’t be changed by a homeowner, at least not immediately. Location really is everything when it comes to security. The risk level of the area you’re in, proximity to neighbors, local police responsiveness (in a city like Long Beach ADT Security alerts may take extra time to go through) – all of these factors very, very heavily into the overall security of a house.

If you already live in a risky neighborhood, make up for that by paying close attention to the security of your home and picking up additional security measures as needed!

Photos: La Rizza, Hugh Jefferson, Significant Homes LLC