The illustration was created by the Nano Banana Pro neural network.
It's good to be surrounded by nature in the summer: the forest, the birds singing, the fresh air. But the summer cottage pastoral has another side: in the fall, thieves start robbing these summer cottages.
A particularly favorable time for them is early autumn, when people appear less often, but valuables have not yet been taken away.
In the dashing 90s, they took everything they could from the house on the parents' plot: folding chairs, chipped cups and spoons, other things, a few jars of cucumbers. They even broke the aluminum legs off the stool. They got into the house simply by breaking a window. But the thieves didn't even get into the shed, which was sheathed in sheet iron.
When my husband and I bought a plot of land, there was a lot of groaning in our garden society: summer residents who came to visit counted the damage from winter visits by thieves. So we decided to protect our home as much as possible from such troubles.
As experience has shown, thieves most often enter a house through windows or by breaking down a wooden door. Moreover, the condition of the house hardly bothers them. Thieves break into both poor and rich houses, the main thing is that there is easy access.
Therefore, we decided to make it as difficult as possible for them to access our, albeit temporary, housing, so that they would not feel disgusted while staying in a robbed house, where everything was turned upside down.
The problem areas are the doors and windows. So instead of the standard wooden ones, we immediately installed iron doors. Not branded ones, ordered from local craftsmen. True, with two mortise locks. One of which was immediately changed, just in case.
With windows it is more complicated. A good option is roller blinds. But they are expensive and it is better to install them during the construction phase of the house.
Therefore, our choice was between bars and shutters.
The bars are reliable, but in the event of a fire, there is little chance of getting out of a burning wooden house with bars on the windows, so we decided that what the hell! Besides, you can easily break a window through the bars. In winter, snow will sweep into a broken window and rain will pour down.
We stopped at the shutters. We made the shutters ourselves from clapboard fastened with bars. There were 2 shutters for each window.
The hinges were attached in such a way that when closed they were inside and it was impossible to pull them out without difficulty.
We didn't mess around with the latch and used an old merchant experience: an iron strip passing through a slot (this is how merchants locked their labas).
We took iron strips 20 cm wider than the window, drilled holes at the ends so that long bolts could fit in. The man riveted the heads of the bolts so that they couldn't be reached with a wrench or torn off with a chisel.
The walls of our house were made of profiled timber 10 cm thick. So we took bolts 15 cm long. We drilled through the walls.
So, the protection of the windows was as follows: an iron strip was placed over the closed shutters, and bolts were inserted into the holes at the edges of the strip. The bolts passed through the wall and were secured inside with appropriate ram nuts to make it easier to tighten them.
If the house is frame, you can place pieces of metal plate under the nut so that thieves do not tear the fasteners out of the thin lining.
Thus, the first floor of our house turned into a kind of fortress. The second floor remained, through which you can also enter the house.
We got there through a hatch. At the bottom of the hatch we attached a powerful bolt with a latch, and at the top — a thin handle on two nails, which easily broke off at the first strong pull.
We cleaned everything from the second floor for the winter. Our home security turned out to be very effective. In the almost 10 years that we lived in this garden association, our house was never broken into, although it looked quite attractive to thieves.
Other, unprotected houses continued to be broken into. One spring, we saw human footprints in the unmelted snow around the house. The thieves went around the house, stomped around the shutters, tried to pry them open, but nothing worked (there were scratches on the wall).
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