Home, home on the range
Brigid has had a home invasion.
Thankfully, things turned out well, but sheesh!
I suggested she equip herself with kick proof doors, which is a relatively simple thing to do, if you understand the dynamics of door-kicking.
Predominantly, you have to have a good door, and a good jamb.
One company that provides that kind of quality is Therma Tru. Their entry doors are solid and made particularly well. At the entry level are the security steel doors, which are reinforced and plenty strong enough in themselves. The nicer doors are fiberglass, and have a surface that can be finished to look like a fine wood door.
While it’s not pretty, the best door for security’s sake is a solid door. A full glass door obviously doesn’t provide much security, but if you are determined to let in some light, use a small, top mounted window that is at least 36″ from the door handle; that way a burgler cannot break the glass and simply reach in and unlock the door.
The strongest door in the world is meaningless without a decent jamb. The obvious choice is a steel jamb, but a lot of people don’t like them, they’re cold, and sometimes installers don’t understand how to attach them so they are any more secure than a wood jamb. And you can as often make a wood jamb as strong as steel, by the installation of a few simple features.
1: Hinges. There are several manufacturers of continuous extruded hinges, mcKinney is one. This type of hinge attaches to the entire edge of the door. There are two rows of screws, and you should use long ass screws. The screws going into the door should be at least 3″ long, and the screws going into the jamb should be at least long enough to go through the stud adjacent to the jamb. If you are lucky enough to be doing this in new construction, or don’t mind removing walls, you can also put a plate on the inside of the stud and drill through and use screws and nuts. The bottomline is, you can get about a hundred and fifty screws into the continuous hinge, and the gear assembly of the hinge not only is vision proof when opened, but the strength is resistant even to breaching rams.
2:Deadbolt. The strongest deadbolt in the world is only as secure as the amount of wood around it, and most deadbolt strikes leave about a half inch of wood in front of them.
At the very least, you need to reinforce that, and you can do so in several ways of varying degrees of diffculty and provided integrity.
My favorite is the pipe. You take a long spade bit and drill through the jamb, the adjacent stud, and another stud. This allows you to insert and secure a piece of 3/4″ pipe into the wall through a couple of studs. You have to be absolutely sure you’re not drilling into wiring, and for this reason this is a good installation for new construction, before the drywall is installed. I have even gone so far as to bolt steel reinforcement plates onto the studs and around the pipe.
Now the deadbolt goes into the pipe, and kicking the door most often results in a broken foot. You can duplicate this two more times, on the top and bottom edge of the door, using blind deadbolts on the door so they are not visible from the outside.
If the door is steel, the deadbolt is usually pretty secure. If it’s fiberglass, less so, with the worst being wood. There are steel reinforcement plates that can be attached around the deadbolt that will help, but only so much. You can install a full-length deadbolt like a MacLock, but again, that is still only good as the jamb it’s attached to.
3:Outswing doors. There are a lot of people that like to leave their doors open, and enjoy the breeze through a screen door or the light through a full-length door. This being the case, most residential doors are inswing. If you are happy to forego a screen door, you can just go to an outswing door. Since an outswing rests against the entire surface of the jamb, it’s nearly impossible to kick in without a vehicle-mounted battering ram. And if you don’t insist on pretty handle type latches on the outside, and instead opt for a simple bell type knob, it’s impossble for anyone to get a handhold and pull the door open.
it is also possible to equip outswing doors with panic bars so they cannot be opened from the outside at all, but can be simply pushed open from the inside.
Also: If your door is a little difficult to unlock, say you have to lift up on the door somewhat to get the key to turn, LEAVE IT ALONE! it is much more difficult for an intruder to pick a lock with lockpicking tools that is difficult to open with a key. The smoother the key works in the lock, the easier to pick the lock. Don’t make it easy for them!
There are a lot of different tips and tricks, but these are good basic ones. Remember the optimum is a steel security door with a continuous hinge, a steel jamb propperly secured to the walls, which opens out. Security goes down from there, but cost can actually go UP.
17 comments Og | Uncategorized
Don’t go through all that work on doors and forget about your large low windows, if you have any. I use what I refer to as the nuclear grade rosebush for window assurance. No one will choose to go through that window without their life already being at stake.
Indeed! I have roses and prickly pear outside the big windows in our home. Steel bars can also be made to look as purely decorative but are indeed security.
My current apartment is fairly secure in terms of the front door — but the back door (flimsy and hollow with a push-button lock in the knob) opens into my landlady’s garage. Where she regularly leaves the back door open with just the glass-topped screen door locked. And yet she gets all freaked out that I have a shotgun, demanding that I keep it unloaded and locked and put away so it won’t affect her homeowner’s insurance (wtf?).
I love her dearly, but she’s the perefct example of someone who uses floodlights and a security system as a blanky to make her feel “safe” so she doesn’t have to dig down to the dirty bottom of what really constitutes home and self-protection. Just demonstrating a fighting stance (foot back, fists up) is enough to give her palpitations.
This is why I end up emptying her mousetraps.
I prefer to allow them entry and watch the security cams as they get picked off by legion of Roomba vacuum bots I reprogrammed to kill.
(Insert maniacal laugher here)
All joking aside, I started sketching a design a while back for a steel door jamb assembly that would actually let the whole door be pushed in about 18 inches when struck. Inside the assembly are progressive shock absorbing springs. Good luck taking that out with a ram…
Graumagus puts his design into production, and suddenly we start seeing SWAT teams on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
I’d LOL.
Thwam! Sproinnnnngggg!!
Any fortification can be a Maginot Line. I have a friend in Crown Point whose neighbor put security storm doors on, and a couple of weeks later he (security-boy) got burglarized, through the lower windows of his bi-level, even with the sensor tape on the windows. And they had no burglaries on the block previously. I’ve known people in Gary who did the bars, cameras, lights thing, and they did a good job of making a pillbox for themselves, but dang, they had to go out some time, and enough of them got their picture windows shotgunned out (hello!), beaten putting the key in the car door in the garage trying to go to the mill, surrounded taking the garbage to the alley, they just threw the house on the market and fled to the sticks. They torched one guy’s garage, and when he ran out for a look-see, got inside his house.
Me, I’d want to have a door that sounds like the house is falling if someone wants to kick it in.
It sounds like someone was casing Brigid, and perhaps the weak back door was her personal protection. I’m sure he’s been on the grounds, checking out the whole outdoors, in the days before, and was there, waiting, watching, like a cat stalking a bird. And he was there, both eyes on her, as she went to the mail box and into the car down the drive. If he (or they) wanted in, and she had a fortress, chances are she may have gotten a pipe on the back of the head as she was flipping through the mail.
All of us are vulnerable to a blind-side. My sorry safety glass and metal doors are my “crumple zone”, alerting me, removing the surprise for the half second I need to have a defense.
Yeah, I think my “crumple zone” is limited to that back door and my psycho cat.
I’m getting a knife to keep by the bed.
Couple of door tricks if you don’t want to go the steel door/frame route:
Use a router or power plane to notch the latch-side jamb and frame to accommodate some 1″ – 1-1/2″ steel angle (the longer, the better). Drill the angle for the latch (grind it to take the striker plate) and the deadbolt. Use long, heavy screws to anchor firmly to adjacent studs. This works best with heavy, solid-wood doors. You can also do the same thing on the the hinge side.
Another trick is to install extra deadbolts that reach down into the door sill and up (if you’re tall enough) into the upper frame. That gives the door six points of attachment and, again, more smash-in resistance (even with cheaper doors).
Of course you can’t protect from everything. Somebody who’s after property will probably want a door open sooner or later (the better to carry stuff out), so hardening the doors (or anything else that makes entry noisier, more difficult, or more time consuming) might encourage them to go elsewhere.
OTOH, if they’re after YOU, smashing through a window might suffice.
On the gripping hand, if you live in a free-fire zone like parts of Gary have become, a 24-hour-a-day armed response is probably barely adequate.
And I see you already had the up-n-down deadbolts covered. (Duh!)
I really recommend that one… it’s something that’s easy for amateurs to do and adds a lot of resistance for a couple of hours’ work.
A set of six or eight 1/2″ steel pins on the hinge-side of the door, projecting into matching steel grommets in the jamb. Pretty near ram-proof on that side of things.
I concur with Og about the top and bottom blind deadbolts, going into properly hardened and reinforced striker plates.
Short of a vault-type door, that’s about all you can reasonably do, short of trip wires, claymores and spring-guns. Those tend to get’cha in trouble.
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
Grouch, the inset plates you mention are a great idea. I’ve seen that sort of thing done, and it’s solid. The upper/lower bolt things are also a great idea, especially if used in conjunction with the continuous hinge and pipe-reinforcement.
I also have the added benefit of… well, of a house that’s a mess, most of the time, at least my areas of it. And anyone trying to move around quietly will be in for a big surprise.
Jim: I’ve always wanted to know; how does one secure a boat? Do you just sleep armed?
(though, I suppose, that’s a dumbass question; you just sail out of reach of intruders, right?
Something to keep in mind, when you make your door impregnable, is that it’s generally pretty easy to get through a wall. Not fast, mind you, unless you have a good supply of detcord, but quite easy.
Sleep well.
M
Another thing is that if your home has been made into a fortress, you better have a quick way to get OUT in case someone just gets pissed and lobs a molotov cocktail against your wall.
If you look at the houses in the barrio or the hood, they all have steel outer doors and iron bars over the windows. Newer codes require a pushout feature, but a lot of people have burned up inside the older or cheap systems.