This morning at about 4am I was jolted out of a deep sleep by what I think was a door slamming. My husband happened to have already been half-awake and it certainly jolted him completely awake. We both reached for our nightstand revolvers and I asked if he heard the noise to, and if he knew what it was. He said he thought it was a door and when I agreed he said, "Let's clear the house."
While clearing the house we discovered that the kitchen door leading to the carport was unlocked (odd...I remember locking it) and the front door was also unlocked and the screen door partially open. I would be inclined to think the wind blew an unsecured outside door shut, but it was not at all windy and the doors should have been locked anyway. No intruder was found and no belongings are missing, but we are almost certain that someone had been in our house because we always check doors and windows before going to bed and I remember them being secured. Finding two outside doors unlocked is suspicious.
We haven't practiced clearing our new house before but I think we did well improvising a plan on the fly.
We also concluded a few things:
- We grabbed our revolvers by reflex because they are close and quicker to grab than the shotgun especially since we were groggy and hadn't identified the location or cause of the sound. In retrospect, we had time after hearing the noise to pick up the shotgun so perhaps one of us should have had the shotgun while clearing the house.
- We're going to speed up our fortification plans and put bars on our bedroom door and the outside door in the room connecting to our bedroom. We were going to wait but after last night I do think they would be useful.
We were considering getting a small camera system with live feed to our computers which would overlook all entrances to our home. I think we definitely want to get one now, if only to have documentation of anything that happens and not necessarily as a deterrent or security blanket. - I'm almost 100% sure we had locked the doors so now we need to test to see if the locks failed, if there was a simple way to break in, or if perhaps we hadn't locked the doors and that's why they were unlocked at 4am.
- We are going to devise a plan for clearing our house tonight so we aren't pulling it together as we go along. Two weeks in a new place was plenty of time to prepare a new plan and we should have already done it.
- And...we really need to get a lamp or a bedside flashlight for the bedroom because stumbling in the dark looking for the overhead light was not cool since it's across the room.
