The front door to your house is one of the most common entry points for intruders, and one of the most important to have secure. You would think that they would try to sneak in through a window or go around back, but most don’t. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that the front door to your house is impenetrable.
To dramatically improve your front door security you can 1. replace the screws in your door’s metal plate with longer three inch screws, 2. replace your short metal plate with a longer one, 3. replace the rest of the door and door hinge screws with the longer three inch screws, 4. replace your hollow door with a solid door, 5. Add a lock that can only be opened from inside, 6. add a “security lock door barricade”, and 7. add a “portable door lock brace” from the inside of the door.
In this article below I go through each of these suggested protections in more detail. (Since we are talking about home security, you might want to check out my emergency preparation website EmergencyPrepGuy.com. It has a lot of great tips on preparing your home and family for emergencies. If home security is important to you, this is a website to definitely check out!)
The Door Knob and Deadbolt Don’t Go Far Enough Into The Door Frame
In most cases, the closing latch on your door knob and the deadbolt lock, if you have one, only go between 1/2 and 1 inch into the door frame. And the wood on a typical door frame just isn’t that sturdy. There is a metal plate on your door frame that the lock goes into. But in almost every case, that metal plate is attached to the door frame with 3/4 inch screws. Which means that the plate is also only attached to that thin wooden door frame.
This makes a lot of front doors really easy to kick in. Just take a look at the picture and see how that wood just split.