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Post by deekaye on Aug 11, 2022 20:48:27 GMT
We live in a rural area, sandwiched betweeen two small cities. We live at the end of a dead-end street and our front door is not visible from the neighbors. We have always locked our doors/windows at night and also when we are away from the house during the day. When we are there, or working outside (front or back yard) we leave everything wide open and feel pretty safe.
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Post by Megan on Aug 11, 2022 20:51:07 GMT
No matter how 'safe' or 'quiet' your neighborhood I don't understand not locking your door. If it's ease of access for in laws or something, wouldn't you just give them a key?
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garcia5050
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Jun 25, 2014 23:22:29 GMT
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Post by garcia5050 on Aug 11, 2022 20:53:52 GMT
Yep, we lock ALL the time. Mostly because we've been robbed once (while we weren't home), attempted robbery again (DH helped nab the guy), car has been rifled through maybe 3 times over the past 20 years. It also looks like people have messed with our locks (car and home). I don't think my area is terrible, but apparently, it ain't great. And, I live in the 'not so great' part of town. I heard it's worse in the better side of town. My mom doesn't lock her door at all (God will take care of her . . .sigh). What is odd is that she doesn't really have windows in her home to circulate air (and she doesn't have A/C), so she leaves her doors wide open. What she ends up having is a critter problem. Mice/Rats come in right through the open doors. Along with a ton of mosquitos.
ETA: I follow the city Insta pages, and for a while, they were sending out daily posts at 9 pm - hey residents, time to check all your doors and windows . . .and all they got was a lot of comments/complaints about how maybe what the city needs more patrols.
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Post by crimsoncat05 on Aug 11, 2022 20:56:35 GMT
No matter how 'safe' or 'quiet' your neighborhood I don't understand not locking your door. If it's ease of access for in laws or something, wouldn't you just give them a key? I'll answer this one from my point of view... our previous house had a locked security door and an outside storm door with two locks on. The security door required a key to open, even from the INside. My DH always locked that door, even if it was the middle of the day and we were right in the living room-- I hated that he would do that. I do NOT like feeling like I'm *locked in* and what the heck are we supposed to do if there's an emergency?!? We hung the key for it right inside the front door, at my insistence... but still-- I'm supposed to fiddle with the key / lock AND round up the cats and dogs and get out of the house safely, if there's a fire and the smoke alarm goes off? no thank you. If we're in the house and awake, I don't think there's any need for me to be locked inside the house. eta: and if we're outside in the yard doing yard work, etc., then I don't want to have to mess around with a key to get back inside the house if I need something. Especially if I have to pee really bad, which is usually what happens. lol.
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Post by bc2ca on Aug 11, 2022 20:56:59 GMT
Is this the place where I confess that I don't lock up the house when I take the pup for a walk, morning or night?
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Post by busy on Aug 11, 2022 20:59:13 GMT
Is this the place where I confess that I don't lock up the house when I take the pup for a walk, morning or night? My people.
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Post by busy on Aug 11, 2022 21:04:26 GMT
No matter how 'safe' or 'quiet' your neighborhood I don't understand not locking your door. If it's ease of access for in laws or something, wouldn't you just give them a key? We take reasonable security precautions but I just don't worry about bad stuff happening all the time. I don't lock my door when I walk the dog because I don't want to carry keys and I don't want to wake anyone up with opening/closing the garage door in the morning. If the door accidentally is left unlocked overnight, whoops, but I'm not stressed about it. I don't lock the door between the house and the garage because I just can't be bothered to deal with unlocking it whenever I come home. We didn't when I was growing up and I never have since I've lived on my own. In 49 years, no place I've lived has had a problem. I could also get in a serious car accident any time I drive, no matter how good of a driver I am, how safe my car is, where I live, etc. I don't worry about that, either. I don't drive less to reduce the risk. I just go about my life in a responsible way and hope for the best. Idk, everyone just has different concerns. I've learned over the years at 2 Peas that I'm way less worried about this kind of stuff than many peas. People I know IRL tend to be more like me.
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Post by crimsoncat05 on Aug 11, 2022 21:36:06 GMT
Idk, everyone just has different concerns. I've learned over the years at 2 Peas that I'm away less worried about this kind of stuff than many peas. People I know IRL tend to be more like me. ^^^ yeah-- the first house I owned was a 1926 cottage with those old-fashioned heavy wooden framed windows. (You know, the kind with removeable storm windows, and ropes with weights for opening the windows...) My bedroom had a HUGE window that looked onto the front porch- that window must have been at least 3x4 feet, probably bigger. I locked the front door, but all anyone had to do was come onto the porch and take the storm window out of the frame to get inside the house. Not much point in locking the door, in that case. I mean, I did lock the door, but if someone wanted to get in, they could have, easily. Heck, I did it myself, once- I had to get into the house by climbing through that window one afternoon, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY, because I forgot my house key! (I kind of hoped a neighbor might have called the police, just because that would have showed they were paying attention, but nope...) My outlook on life is 'most people are basically good, and law-abiding' otherwise I'd make myself crazy thinking about all the bad things that *might* happen.
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Post by flanz on Aug 11, 2022 22:15:38 GMT
I would guess this will end up being known as a family dispute or similar but who knows at the moment. I agree... but others could have been hurt as well. And it's jarring for a community no matter what. I always thought of Skye as being a safe place to escape the violence.
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Post by brynn on Aug 11, 2022 22:28:27 GMT
We started locking our doors on the farm after a farm family were eld captive by escaped convicts. My mom went to high school with the mother. I always lock my doors.
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Post by gar on Aug 11, 2022 22:31:03 GMT
I would guess this will end up being known as a family dispute or similar but who knows at the moment. I agree... but others could have been hurt as well. And it's jarring for a community no matter what. I always thought of Skye as being a safe place to escape the violence. I think it is an incredibly safe place but anywhere there are humans there’s the potential for a falling out/dispute etc. in my mind that very different from random burglaries etc.
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Post by ~summer~ on Aug 11, 2022 22:33:53 GMT
Speaking of garage safety - my parents have a second home up the coast but they are up there all the time - at least every few weeks. A few years ago they discovered evidence that some one had been staying in their garage - there was some food and a place to sleep. In retrospect I’m not sure how it happened since they (unlike me) are fastidious about locking their garage and house. After that though they got security cameras. Their neighbor though *did* have security cameras - and one day just decided to check the camera feed and saw a guy dancing around in his underwear and hanging out in their house! They could also see weapons so it garnered quite the police/swat team response. It was actually a sad story - the guy was pretty young ![:(](//storage.proboards.com/5645536/images/mYSUyHtG9Jrcmm_ydVcK.jpg)
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peabay
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Jun 25, 2014 19:50:41 GMT
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Post by peabay on Aug 11, 2022 22:35:36 GMT
Pretty quiet. If I went for a walk on my street I'd probably be passed by 3 or 4 cars.
and we lock our doors at night - that's it.
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iluvpink
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Jul 13, 2014 12:40:31 GMT
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Post by iluvpink on Aug 11, 2022 23:30:07 GMT
We live in a small subdivision in small town about fifteen miles outside of a small city. Semi Rural. Our particular town is quite safe, the larger small city is not. We lock our house and car doors at night. The garage door is down when nobody is outside, but more because dh doesn't want dust/rain/snow on the cars or squirrels/chipmunks running in. Now if he's out there work and comes inside for a few minutes, he doesn't shut it. We do not lock the door between the house and garage during the day, but we do at night. DD for some reason uses the front door to come and go and doesn't always lock it behind her if someone else is home. Which occasionally leads to whoever is home leaving through the garage and not remembering to check the front door. We don't stress over it though. A lot of our neighbors either work at home, are sahm's or retired. The retired people are well, not busy bodies, but they keep an eye on things and let you know if something isn't right lol. The first day we moved in one of us parked in the street in front of the mailbox. It was well after the mail would arrive, but the elderly gentleman across the street came over in the evening to let us know to move our car before the mail arrived the next day so the mail lady could deliver mail. ![(rofl)](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/rofl.png) It's a tight group here, so we are not particularly worried. Nor have we had or heard of any issues since we moved here five years ago. The small town police also patrol through once or twice a day and I know a few firefighters and police live in the subdivision. ETA because we are in a subdivision, we do get a lot cars going by, those who live here. And we have a ton of people walking, biking, kids playing outside etc.
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Post by melanell on Aug 12, 2022 0:16:04 GMT
I just never grew up locking doors during the day. We were always running in and out of the house all of the time. We didn't have central air, and only used window units when it was extremely hot, and so we kept the doors open except for the coldest months, and locking a screen door seems rather useless, kwim?
And now as an adult, we are basically the same---doors open for breezes almost all day long.
Our road is busy--we have traffic all day long, but that doesn't change how I feel about leaving the doors open when we're home.
Now, in our last house we did keep the front door locked because we did not have a screen/storm door on it and our layout was such that you couldn't see the door from anywhere in the house other than the entry, and the entry was not one that rooms right off of it. It was a split entry--so you came in and had to go upstairs or downstairs immediately.
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moodyblue
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Post by moodyblue on Aug 12, 2022 0:36:30 GMT
I live in a bi-state metro area that has about 400,000 people between the two counties. My small city has less than 40,000 people and I live in what’s considered to be a good neighborhood. My street has lots of walkers, joggers, dog walkers and a fairly light amount of vehicle traffic, more when school is in session as people use this street to avoid the main avenue where there’s a school. I’m about a block off of one of the major north-south streets in the city.
For the past couple years there has been a huge amount of stolen car reports (often by very young teens), cars being gone through, people stealing cars and then using them to commit other crimes, etc. And even before that there were several robberies at homes within sight of my house: one was robbed by a teen on a bike - during the day, another was a smash and grab where they broke the front door in and took the new flat screen TV - at about 5 pm in December. Last year a car pulled in to a driveway on the court on the other side of the street; the garage was open and the woman who was taking care of the house and yard for the owner was in the backyard. One of the guys in the unfamiliar car was able to access the house through the open garage. They then came over to my house, where my brother's car was parked in my driveway. Typically, if someone comes in through my garage I will close the garage door after them, but I didn’t that day because I’d been working out there. We were sitting on the screen porch in back when a neighbor came around calling for me because her husband had seen them checking out my car and my brother's. This all happened about 2 in the afternoon.
The best thing my husband and I did for security was to put a keypad lock on the door from the garage to the house. It is set to lock automatically whenever you close it - but access is very fast with the keypad and you don’t have to have a key so you don’t get locked out. We did this because we realized that if he were in the backyard mowing or whatever, garage door up, and I was gone, anyone could walk right into the house from the garage and he’d never know.
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND A KEYPAD LOCK ON THE DOOR FROM THE GARAGE INTO THE HOUSE. And yes, I’m shouting. I believe in it that much.
When I had a new front door installed a couple years ago, I got a keypad lock on it also. I’d like to switch out the back door lock set to a keypad also.
The neighbors across the street (where the smash and grab was) have talked about how often there are teenagers or youngish people out on the street in the middle of the night (they see them on their cameras). I always have my car in the garage, but my next-door neighbors park all four of their cars in the driveway. They do however always lock them, which is good because the middle of the night roaming people are looking for easy opportunities.
And as a reminder that crime can happen anywhere and at any time, friends of mine had their house robbed at about 7 am; the thief came in the kitchen window while they were all upstairs getting ready for school/work. He was in and out quickly and they didn’t know a thing until coming downstairs and finding things missing.
I almost never have windows or doors unlocked/open downstairs unless I’m right there. I’m sitting on the screen porch as I type this and the back door is open now, but if I were to go upstairs I would close and lock it. The outer screen porch door would not stop anyone.
I say "almost never" because I will confess to occasionally forgetting to close the garage door or lock the back door, because I think I’m going back out and then don’t. I can control the garage door from my phone so I can check it and close it remotely.
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Post by Karene on Aug 12, 2022 1:19:48 GMT
We live in a small rural town near a big city. We are also on the main highway through town, so traffic never stops. Our front door is always locked because we never use it. In fact, I'm not exactly sure where the key is! Our side door is almost always unlocked and same with our sliding patio door. We lock it at night if we remember. We don't have an alarm, a dog (anymore), not even a doorbell. Our house was built in the 1860s so our garage is not attached to the house and is more of a barn. It does not have a lock. The door is a sliding door and it used to freeze open in the winter and stay like that for 6 months! We never had anything taken from it. But raccoons used to like it, so now we fixed the bottom so it won't freeze to the ground. So it is now closed every night but just to keep critters out. It's still not locked. We do lock our car doors.
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Post by peano on Aug 12, 2022 1:46:31 GMT
We live in a rural suburb but our street is a popular cut through from the town just north of us to points south. I don't typically keep the back door locked during the day, but I do keep the front door locked because a lady from the neighborhood with dementia walked into our house when DS was an infant looking for people who no longer lived here. Freaked me out. All the doors are locked at night. I don't typically lock my car because there's nothing in it but dog paraphernalia, e.g. silicone water bowls and leashes.
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schizo319
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Jun 28, 2014 0:26:58 GMT
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Post by schizo319 on Aug 12, 2022 2:14:39 GMT
Our city is only about 55k people. I live near the hospital and 2 schools, so it gets pretty busy at certain times. We only lock up at night when we go to bed, but we also have 3 very loud dogs who lose their shit any time anyone comes near the driveway (including kids walking to/from school every day twice a day).
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Post by Merge on Aug 12, 2022 2:22:48 GMT
Quiet urban residential area. House break ins are very rare. Still, we keep the doors and our cars locked at all times. I have pestered DH about closing the garage door when he comes in from doing hobby stuff and he’s better about it - I can at least rely on him to close the garage door before dinner time.
We have a keypad lock on the front door so there’s no problem with people locking themselves out. We love not having to take a key when we go out for a walk.
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J u l e e
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Jun 28, 2014 2:50:47 GMT
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Post by J u l e e on Aug 12, 2022 2:39:03 GMT
Our doors automatically lock when we close them, unless we unlock them inside before going out, which we don’t. There’s a key in the garage in case we lock ourselves out, but our doors are always locked by default.
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Post by Susie_Homemaker on Aug 12, 2022 13:27:05 GMT
No matter how 'safe' or 'quiet' your neighborhood I don't understand not locking your door. If it's ease of access for in laws or something, wouldn't you just give them a key? We don't lock it up if we're out in the yard because it's just not necessary to do so. There aren't people wandering around our neighborhood during the daytime waiting for us to go out the front door so that they can go in through the back door. It's just not happening. "Could it", yes, but so "could" a lot of things- fire, car accidents, trip and fall, etc.... It's safe to leave our doors unlocked while we're home and statistics will prove that. We lock the doors at night and set the alarm. We lock them when we leave home. We take reasonable precautions, but to lock them every time we go outside is not one of them, where I live that would seem paranoid.
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Post by chaosisapony on Aug 13, 2022 17:34:44 GMT
I live in a rural town with a population of 600. However, my house is right on the main road that spans 3 counties that everyone in all of those neighboring areas uses to get to work and/or to a city to shop. So while my town isn't busy my particular road sure can be. And of course people drive about 30 mph over the posted speed limit which does not help.
I keep my doors locked most of the time unless I'm going in and out. It's just a habit. However there have been instances nearby of in the last couple of years of break ins and home invasions within a few miles of my house so I do my best to keep things locked up tight including the back yard and the shed. If there's an emergency it takes the sheriff about 20 minutes to get here so I think it's important to minimize my risks in any way I can.
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markdis
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Post by markdis on Aug 13, 2022 21:38:54 GMT
One of the best area I've ever lived. Small quiet town with the beautiful old town. Enough cafes and bars but no hustle of the big cities. I love it here and it saves me a lot of time as I can reach almost everywhere within 10-15 minutes. With the help from writinguniverse.com/free-essay-examples/sociology/ my studies are much easier and I have a lot of spare time for sports and other things I really like.
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Post by 950nancy on Aug 13, 2022 21:42:50 GMT
DH leaves the garage door open all the time. He might be in there, in the backyard or at Home Depot. I only shut it if I'm going out and his truck is missing. I also lock up before going to bed. It isn't unusual to get a text from a neighbor telling me the garage is open. I assume they are checking that everything is locked up before going to bed, including out place. DH used to forget to close the garage quite a lot and it bothered me to discover it had been open all night, no matter how safe our neighborhood is. More than anything else, I was afraid of the pets getting out. We upgraded our garage door opener to one with an app that allows us to open/close remotely and also to schedule closes. So now we have two "tests" scheduled every evening/night to check if the door is open and if so, close it. I have a MyQ to tell me if the garage doors are shut. I used to get about 3 minutes from my house and turn around and drive back to check. Now I check the app.
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Post by 950nancy on Aug 13, 2022 21:44:36 GMT
Our city is only about 55k people. I live near the hospital and 2 schools, so it gets pretty busy at certain times. We only lock up at night when we go to bed, but we also have 3 very loud dogs who lose their shit any time anyone comes near the driveway (including kids walking to/from school every day twice a day). We still have people who walk by all of the time, but my dogs are now plagued with deer and turkeys that just stand in their yard and poop. Delicious and infuriating at the same time.
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Post by 950nancy on Aug 13, 2022 21:48:35 GMT
I live in a bi-state metro area that has about 400,000 people between the two counties. My small city has less than 40,000 people and I live in what’s considered to be a good neighborhood. My street has lots of walkers, joggers, dog walkers and a fairly light amount of vehicle traffic, more when school is in session as people use this street to avoid the main avenue where there’s a school. I’m about a block off of one of the major north-south streets in the city. For the past couple years there has been a huge amount of stolen car reports (often by very young teens), cars being gone through, people stealing cars and then using them to commit other crimes, etc. And even before that there were several robberies at homes within sight of my house: one was robbed by a teen on a bike - during the day, another was a smash and grab where they broke the front door in and took the new flat screen TV - at about 5 pm in December. Last year a car pulled in to a driveway on the court on the other side of the street; the garage was open and the woman who was taking care of the house and yard for the owner was in the backyard. One of the guys in the unfamiliar car was able to access the house through the open garage. They then came over to my house, where my brother's car was parked in my driveway. Typically, if someone comes in through my garage I will close the garage door after them, but I didn’t that day because I’d been working out there. We were sitting on the screen porch in back when a neighbor came around calling for me because her husband had seen them checking out my car and my brother's. This all happened about 2 in the afternoon. The best thing my husband and I did for security was to put a keypad lock on the door from the garage to the house. It is set to lock automatically whenever you close it - but access is very fast with the keypad and you don’t have to have a key so you don’t get locked out. We did this because we realized that if he were in the backyard mowing or whatever, garage door up, and I was gone, anyone could walk right into the house from the garage and he’d never know. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND A KEYPAD LOCK ON THE DOOR FROM THE GARAGE INTO THE HOUSE. And yes, I’m shouting. I believe in it that much.When I had a new front door installed a couple years ago, I got a keypad lock on it also. I’d like to switch out the back door lock set to a keypad also. The neighbors across the street (where the smash and grab was) have talked about how often there are teenagers or youngish people out on the street in the middle of the night (they see them on their cameras). I always have my car in the garage, but my next-door neighbors park all four of their cars in the driveway. They do however always lock them, which is good because the middle of the night roaming people are looking for easy opportunities. And as a reminder that crime can happen anywhere and at any time, friends of mine had their house robbed at about 7 am; the thief came in the kitchen window while they were all upstairs getting ready for school/work. He was in and out quickly and they didn’t know a thing until coming downstairs and finding things missing. I almost never have windows or doors unlocked/open downstairs unless I’m right there. I’m sitting on the screen porch as I type this and the back door is open now, but if I were to go upstairs I would close and lock it. The outer screen porch door would not stop anyone. I say "almost never" because I will confess to occasionally forgetting to close the garage door or lock the back door, because I think I’m going back out and then don’t. I can control the garage door from my phone so I can check it and close it remotely. We had a lot of people in and out for construction this spring and summer. Loved that we could change the key pad code for them and then change it back. We have also found 5 keys hidden outside of our house in the yard. They have all been hidden in baggies or fake rocks. We changed the locks the day after we moved in and so it doesn't matter, but I can't imagine who hid all of these keys. And how many haven't we found? Our home is surrounded by rock, so who knows?
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Post by gorgeouskid on Aug 13, 2022 22:46:26 GMT
My area is busy. We leave the side door unlocked and open when we're home, but only because we have a tall driveway gate.
When we're not at home, everything is locked up tightly and alarmed.
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Gennifer
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Jun 26, 2014 8:22:26 GMT
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Post by Gennifer on Aug 14, 2022 0:12:15 GMT
No matter how 'safe' or 'quiet' your neighborhood I don't understand not locking your door. If it's ease of access for in laws or something, wouldn't you just give them a key? It’s not about ease for anyone else, it’s just more work for me to walk in when I have to unlock the door first, as opposed to just opening it. There are 6+ of us, in and out all day, plus letting dogs in and out. I’m all about the ease. Honestly, I don’t think we even know where the keys are. 🤷🏼♀️
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muggins
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Post by muggins on Aug 14, 2022 3:14:58 GMT
I live in downtown Tokyo is a very busy area. I leave my front door unlocked all day when I’m home. The back door wall is always open in warm weather for the dogs to go in and out. We also keep 4 expensive mountain bicycles chained in front of the house. My bicycle is left unlocked on the porch. There are many garages here with no doors. People leave bicycles, kids toys, household stuff, extra equipment etc and no one steals it. Theft is rare.
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