25 Forgotten Door Habits Every 1970s Family Had (And Nobody Does Now)

https://raykessler.vercel.app For thirty one years I was a home insurance claims adjuster in Ohio. I walked into about four thousand houses the morning after somebody got in, with a metal clipboard and a camera, and wrote down what was gone. I never once saw the man who did it. I only ever saw the room he left behind. Here is the thing about doors that took me twenty years to say out loud. In my files the front door was almost never broken. In the great majority of the door entries I ever wrote up there was no damage at all: no splintered frame, no pry mark, no glass. The door was unlocked, or it was standing open, or somebody had answered it. I did not have a burglary problem in my files. I had a habit problem. On the fourth of October, two thousand six, I stood on a stoop in Monroeville and filled out a form with almost nothing on it, because Harold and Iva Lamb had spent zero dollars on security in thirty five years and were still running the door habits their generation ran. Two streets over, eleven days earlier, I had written a nine thousand four hundred dollar claim on a house with a three thousand six hundred dollar monitored system, because the door from the garage was unlocked at four in the afternoon the way it had been for two years. So this is not a countdown. It is one ordinary day in a house, from the porch light going off in the morning to the last lock at night, and the twenty five door habits that day was built on. Every one of them is free. Every one of them is a thing a person does, not a thing a person buys. WHAT IS ON THIS LIST The porch light a person turns off instead of a photocell - the newspaper that never sat past seven - the hook and eye on the screen door, latched all summer with the wooden door wide open behind it - the milk box emptied the same morning - looking before your hand goes to the knob - the script the children knew - the delivery that was never left against the house - the mailbox emptied every single day - the back door as the family door - where the spare key actually lived, which is none of the four places you are picturing - the rule for a child who comes home to an open door - the garage door closed between uses - the button in the knob on the door from the garage - the last one in locks it - the round done before dinner instead of before bed - the chain at dusk, not at bedtime - the dog door checked five times a night - the curtains at dusk - the same route in the same order every night - the car in the driveway that was never a security measure - where the keys lived - the back light nobody remembers - and number twenty five, the two minute phone call before you leave town. WHAT I KEPT PHOTOGRAPHING Three newspapers in yellow bags on a step. A mailbox on Blymyer Avenue so full the door would not shut, photographed before I ever photographed the house. A laundry basket propping open the door between a garage and a kitchen. A key still sitting in the inside of a lock beside a broken sidelight. A dead bulb in the fixture over a back door that nobody can see from the street. A doormat lifted, with the clean rectangle where a key had sat for years. THE OTHER SIDE OF IT My brother Ray spent thirty five years as a locksmith. He is the one who put things back; I am the one who wrote the checks. Everything on this list is free, so there is nothing here for me to sell you, and he wrote the free ones down better than I can. https://raykessler.vercel.app I am not selling you a system and I am not a security consultant. I am the man who came the morning after and wrote down what he saw. #homesecurity #doorsecurity #homeowners #1970s #hometips