Do you always lock your home/apartment/etc doors?

[Ning Ning]

Do you mean when I am home or away? I ALWAYS lock when I am away. I probably do most of the time when home, especially after dark. I do often leave the door open so the cat can look out, but there is a secondary glass door that does lock.

Funny story - one time I stepped outside and found a hornet zipping around me. I ran inside and closed the door then locked it. My friend was there and asked me, "Did you just lock the door so the hornet wouldn't get in?" Yes, I did - you just never know, right?

Ha! I did something similar a few years ago. I opened the wooden door to the patio and when I opened the storm door, there was a snake stretched out at my feet! I quickly slammed the storm door shut, catching part of the snake in it, then I slammed the wooden door shut and locked it so the snake couldn't get in! Luckily, my neighbor was home and he wasn't afraid, so he came and caught the snake.

 

[Bad Pink Tink 2.0]

I cant even imagine not locking doors, windows and having a house alarm on when the house is empty. In my neighbourhood social media group there are regular reports of houses and cars being broken into. The local police every Christmas even make PSA about making sure cars are locked and not used to store Christmas presents.

 

[loves to dive]

We lock all our doors when we are leaving the house except the kitchen door off the garage. We do close the garage door. We have a coded entry on the garage so we can get in it from outside if we don't have a key since hubby did once lock himself out of the house and I was at work. He didn't have his phone on him so he ended up breaking the window into the basement door and cut the heck out of his arm getting it open and had to go to emergency. It's one of those sort of garage type doors that slides up but does have a small window in it. Our cars are all locked, even the ones in the garage but especially his truck that stays in the driveway. We used to keep the front door locked all the time but the back door unlocked during the day because I'm always taking the dog in and out but now we have started keeping both doors unlocked during the day since the dog has decided she wants to make a circuit of the yard when she goes out and go out one door and in the other. Our garage door stays closed all the time unless one of us is working in the yard or I have gone out with my car, then it's open until I come home since hubby works from home and is always in the house. We live in a subdivision but it's literally out in what used to be a cow pasture in the country with the nearest anything at least 10 miles away. Hubby's parents, who live in rural south Georgia, didn't start locking their doors when they left the house until about 5 years ago.

 

[Moliphino]

What really gets me is folks that leave their garage doors wide open for hours on end and not even being near the front of the house. Or if I come home at night and it's dark I'll see a garage door open, completely dark inside.

I get funny about the garage door being open. Working in the yard, yes it's open, assuming we're going to the front of the house every so often and it's daylight. But in the daylight if we are just working in the backyard, we use the back service door and keep the main doors closed.

A couple years ago we accidentally left a garage door open for a week when we were on vacation, with the door into the house from the garage also unlocked. Nothing happened, thankfully.

 

[LilyWDW]

I always have at least the door knob lock and the deadbolt locked when I am in my apartment or out. I don't always have the chain lock on if I am home, but it always gets done at night before I go to bed.

While I live in a big city now, it was the same even when I lived in the nicer burbs. Not that I live in a bad area or anything, but leaving the door unlocked would just be asking for trouble. Why make yourself an easier target? I feel the same way about people who leave valuables in their cars and are shocked if something gets stolen. Like, yea, the fault is on the thief... but you just made it a heck of a lot easier.

 

[mary_jones]

Yes, I always lock all the doors at home. I will just feel very anxious if the door is open and I am not at home at the time.

 

[EACarlson]

In my current house, the back door is unlocked from the time the first person leaves the house until bedtime, unless the house is empty, which doesn't happen all that often during the week. The front door is only unlocked long enough to grab the mail unless my inlaws are coming over. The garage has a routine, that it will close automagically at 10pm when my wife leave it open when she gets home. When I lived in Minneapolis, my mother's house had an automagically locking deadbolt on the door, so when you closed the door it was locked. When I lived in an apartment, I kept the door locked always unless I was actively using it. If I had to run down to the garage for something, I would lock the apartment.

 

[jimmymc]

Always lock the doors when we leave the house or go to sleep. If I'm home and awake, it's about 50/50.

 

[tvguy]

Our doors are always locked. We are in a condo type community with many people. We have had recent issues with people breaking into unlocked cars so I always lock the house.

I worked overnights in a TV Newsroom for decades and monitored the police radios. It is amazing in apartment and condo complexes how many people get confused and try and get into the wrong unit, thinking it was theirs, a family members or friends. Some were impaired, but often it is an honest mistake. They live one building over.

 

[Imzadi]

NYC apartment dweller here. Always locked. Even when I go downstairs to pick up the mail. Or to wash my clothes. I have no interest in coming back and finding someone in my apartment when I come back. Or that a neighbor saw me leave, knew I'd be gone for 10 minutes to put in a load of laundry and could rummage around and steal stuff.

There is a saying, "Good fences make good neighbors." Well, so do locked doors.