It saddens me to say that on the night of Tuesday 16th June my garage/workshop was broken into.
It looks like the burglar initially attempted to attack one of the garage door locks with a screwdriver.
Then when that failed tried pushing on the top corner of the door in an attempt to bend it in.
When that also failed, they climbed up onto the roof and smashed one of the corrugated cement fibre panels.
The black on the various parts of the pictures is graphite that the police forensic people brushed on in the hope of finding some finger prints.
Unfortunately they believe that the burglar was probably wearing gloves, although they did manage to pull some good boot prints from the inside of the garage door where the burglar climbed down.
I believe the burglar must have been disturbed at some point as I discovered the garage door wide open with several tool cases on the floor by the opening at 08:30 on Wednesday morning when I was taking my son to school.
Initially I thought nothing had been taken, but on further investigation discovered that a couple of Bosch woodworking routers had been taken as well as a Senco collating screw gun.
I was not initially aware of the hole in the roof as it was hidden by the open garage door which is of the ‘up and over’ variety.
My main concern was that since the burglar had left in a hurry, but had seen what else was available for the taking, they would be back, possibly in greater numbers and probably with a van, the question was, how soon would that be?
There was little I could do in order to secure the garage further in the immediate term, so my first action was to remove as many valuable items as possible and bring them into the house for safe keeping.
Next I dug out an ES-IPS506 CCTV camera system I bought a few years ago that I had been intending to install on the outside of the house
and put one of these up at the front of the garage.
Now this camera is not actually connected to anything, other than power, as the base unit is not currently in the garage, and I cannot locate the instruction manual that tells me how to connect to or make changes to the base unit.
This does however act as a visual deterrent, especially at night as the Infra Red LEDs will be lit up showing that it is powered on.
Additionally, since these cameras are not actually water proof, I will need to replace this with one that is actually intended for external use at some point.
I bought some Enfield garage door bolts for £60.60 including P&P for 2 pairs, all keyed alike, from Lockshop Warehouse.
These bolts are ideally supposed to be fitted to the back of the door about 200mm off the ground and secure through the side of the garage door into the frame.
However since my garage doors have vertical ribs, I have had to fit these so that they secure downwards directly into the concrete floor.
This is the inside view.
and this is the view from outside.
Because of the location I chose for mounting, I am also unable to use the escutcheon covers for the key holes.
They are secured using dome head coach bolts and on the inside. I have swapped the standard nuts for nyloc nuts such that a spanner or socket is required to wind off the entire nut and not just loosen then spin off the nut.
I thought that these were much less obvious from the exterior than a garage defender type lock, which some people argue is advertising that you may have something worth stealing inside.
I also bought an LS400 4 zone 2 wire alarm system for £55.99 with free delivery from Maplin.
This comes with 4 magnetic reed switches, 2 PIR sensors, an external siren and the base control unit.
So far I have installed a reed switch on the personal entry door (zone 1 – entry/exit).
A PIR sensor personal entry end of the garage (zone3)
and the other PIR at the garage door end of the garage (zone 4).
I have also fitted the external siren so it faces the house
and the control panel near the personal entry door
I will at some point fit the additional magnetic reed switches to the 2 garage doors, however I will wait until I have added some insulation and boarding to the area above the doors so there is less of a gap to span.
As soon as I locate the instructions for the IP camera system I will install some more cameras inside the garage/workshop and will be able to have them record on motion sensing, send data to my computers, as well as being able to view what the cameras are showing via their web page.
One could argue that in the 5 years that the garage has been in place I simply been lucky, however I personally believe it is a sad reflection of the way that things are going in this country.