Your Front Door is Easy to Kick In. Here's What You Can Do.

The best way to secure your home is with our security doors and security screens for windows.

If you don’t yet have them, there are few things you can do quickly and easily fortify your door. Here’s MJ Johnston, our Chief Security Advisor and veteran security expert, to help guide you:

If you remember from our last week's segment, we were talking about door security, outdoor lighting, and we were talking about some security systems that you could put into place that would help you. So today we're at our local Home Depot store. We're down here at 1030 West Sunset at my local Home Depot. I practically live here. What you probably don't know, or I didn't mention to you last time, is that I've been building custom homes for almost 20 years. So today we're going to talk about specifically door jambs and what you can do to strengthen and harden that target prior to someone making an entry. So the first thing you want to look at is the door jamb itself. Now this here is called the strike plate. The strike plate is exactly where the deadbolt is going to enter, and you want to have at least a one-inch depth insert for that.

You'll notice that there are two types of screws here. We have a smaller one, which is the standard three-quarter to one inch, and then you have the three-inch screw that goes in through the strike plate, through the jamb, and into the actual sub framing. That's very important that you have a three-inch screw at a minimum, so that makes sure that that strike plate is secure and it's resistant to kicking. So here we have a box of nails that we were going to show you. Construction screws here. This is a number nine by three inch. This one happens to be in a gold color, but you're going to want to match it up. Obviously, if you have black, you want to use the black ones. If you have a bronze or copper one like this one, you're going to want to use these type of screws, but this is exactly what you're looking for at a minimum to strengthen those strike plates.

Okay, so now the second important part of the door is the locking mechanisms itself. Now, when we go over to the door and lock section, you're going to see a variety of locks that are available. There's the keypad touch, there's the remote control, like through the Wi-Fi, and then there's the old standard manual turning deadbolt. One of the things that, again, you're looking for is that one-inch depth, which is very standard on most of your locking mechanisms these days. You want to make sure that it is moving freely because if you are relying on a Wi-Fi-enabled locking system, you want to make sure that that's not getting hung up, and when you leave that, it's not actually locking because then you have just an open door and anyone can walk through it. So you definitely want to make sure that they're in good condition and that they're working well. But as you can see, when we bring this thing in and you lock it in, you now have a secure entry point.