Three in the morning, how I hate it.
Woke up an hour ago. Night noises. The house creaks, snaps, pops, and crackles all night long, especially when temperatures drop sharply at night. The beams in the attic make bright snapping sounds, and the ductwork grumbles to itself. I’ve lived in houses that made settling sounds, of course. But this one takes the cake in that department. You’d think after 38 years the place would have done all the settling it’s going to do.
Then up pops a real unusual sound: like someone rapping on the door. Three distinct taps: knock knock knock. The dog heard it. Her head shot up, ears erect. She didn’t bark, though; and she is a barker. I figured if anybody tried seriously to get in, she’d fly into one of her yapfests.
Further noises were ambiguous: could’ve been settling sounds. The dog perked up to listen a couple of other times but still kept quiet. By now I was wide awake and listening for every freaking creak, groan, and whisper.
Twenty minutes, half an hour later, along comes the cop helicopter.
He buzzed the alley and yards on this end of the street for about 15 minutes. So, evidently someone else thought somebody was out there.
Charming.
The back door has a single-cylinder deadbolt and a doorknob lock—both highly vulnerable because the door has French-door style lights, pretty easy to knock in. I refuse to have a double-cylinder deadbolt on a kitchen door; it’s unsafe. The door is alarmed, so if anyone breaks in while I’m here, he’ll wake me and the dog and give himself a healthy shot of adrenalin.
The damned sliding doors are old, tired, and broken. Though they also are all alarmed, one of them doesn’t latch at all; another latches but doesn’t lock. They’re “secured” (such as it is) with sticks in the runners.
And of course, the back window: oh, the lovely back window. Whatever possessed developers to install aluminum junk like that? It also is a sliding affair with a flimsy latch—nothing resembling a lock. You can drop a stick in the runner and be damned. The glass is held in place with rubber weather stripping. All you have to do is slip a little slot screwdriver under the weatherstripping, quietly pull it out, and voilà! The glass pane will lift right out. In the wee hours of one morning, SDXB found a couple guys coming in his front window, they having gained entry that way. You wonder why he moved to Sun City?
{sigh} I probably should have security doors installed in back, and get Chip at Freelite to install a new, more secure—and double-paned!—window back there. His last newsletter showed he’s carrying some fairly snazzy-looking security doors with a Prairie School look to them. I really dislike security doors: I feel the bad guys belong behind bars, not us. But if I can find something that doesn’t look like a prison door, well…
Well, indeed…don’t even ask how much such a thing costs. A somewhat nonugly security door for a single opening is amazing. For the double-sized door you’d have to get to go over an Arcadia…OMG! This house has three Arcadias plus the kitchen door. And by the time I’ve spent myself stupid on security doors, I’ll still have the cheesy old single-pane tinfoil door the developer put in and the cheap double-paned Arcadia door Satan installed, a thing for which “low-E” is not an operative term.
It would be cheaper to wait until I’m canned and just take myself out to Sun City. Ugh.
I need to get a shotgun.