Prepare Your Home for your Vacation!

If you are going on vacation, it’s especially important to take some proactive steps to protect your home.  Here are a few things to make your home appear inhabited, and foil potential burglars. Enlist the help of trusted neighbours, family and friends. Here are some things you can and should do to keep your home safer.

Visit your Post Office and have all your mail, flyers, and deliveries held until your return.  Hire a service or friend to cut your grass, and maintain your yard.  Make friends with your neighbours, ask them to put one of their garbage containers in front of your home on collection day and park a car in your driveway periodically.

Leave a radio on, and put a main floor TV on a timer to come on each day at dusk and go off at normal bed time. If you have a garage, make sure the garage doors are locked, and window blinds closed. If you have powered door openers, shut the power off to the openers for better security.  Have your outside lights on motion detection.

While it is exciting to go on vacation and it’s normal to want to talk about it…avoid talking about your vacation plans with strangers or service people. Avoid posting on social media that your are away.  If possible use your work address for luggage tags so handlers won’t know your home address.

If you have an alarm system, never cancel or suspend your phone service without consulting with your alarm company about how this might affect your service. Insure your contact list is up to date with current phone #’s, including the emergency contact people listed.   It never hurts to remind people that they are on your call list for the monitoring station.  If you don’t have an alarm system now might be the time to consider one!

Bon voyage!