Do you lock up your house?

i have to lock 3 doors when i leave!

I just spent a week in MI and realized: I never in my life have had a house key! Parents now lock their doors at night and when they leave, but that's also b/c they had a break-in to the garage recently.

I voted "I lock all of the doors when I'm out"

mine are locked all the time -- not necessarily for security reasons but because the inner apartment doors don't latch themselves and therefore won't stay shut unless locked

I don't lock my back door bcz it's hard to get unlocked, but the gate to get to my backdoor has big hardcore padlocked chain (people from the upstairs apt kept trying to fuck w/the apt complex meters & cable boxes, which are in my backyard).

I lock the door all the time, including when I'm in. My dad is religious about locking doors and I got the habit from him.

i am lucky to have an indoor kitty who actually stays indoors even if the doors are wide open -- so sometimes if i am home and it is nice out i will just let leave all the doors open for a nice crossbreeze

There have been times when I discovered next day that I forgot to lock up the night before (and once I left the shop/office unlocked for three days), but generally we lock up at night and when we're away.

I habitually lock the doors since at the old house, sometimes the front door would blow open if you didn't.

There was still the one time that I went to band practice, hit the bar afterward and came back to my house to see my cats looking at me through the glass storm door with my real front door wide open. Holy shit.

That's the kind of thing that makes me have a miniature heart attack abt myself.

ha, yeah, my front door is too loose to stay closed without the deadbolt. xp

I have the doors locked all the time, even when I'm at home

It's just a good habit to get into, like fastening your seatbelt. Doesn't take any extra time, could save all your shit even if you live in a very low-crime area.

I always lock the doors when I'n at home but it wouldn't make much sense to do otherwise in an apt. If I'm at say my parents' place and it's nice outside then I'll leave the doors onto the deck/backyard open until I go to sleep.

do you lock up your house?

http://www.javno.com/slike/slike_3/r1/g2009/m03/y197155762929959.jpg

I never have my front door locked when I'm at home. Hate it. I want people to be able to walk in - say Hi - borrow sugar if necessary.

Front door to the apartment doesn't close unless it's locked, so that's always locked. In the summer, it's nice to have the back door open while I'm in the kitchen to let some breeze in -- but otherwise that's locked, too.

I lock up tight - had a rough break-in when I lived in DC and can't get past it, even though I now live out in the sticks.

Ever since my car was stolen a few years ago, I habitually hit the lock button on the remote twice, so the car honks and I can know for sure it's locked.

Everything's locked all the time, because:

(a) It's been practically a decade since I've lived anywhere that exterior doors weren't self-locking
(b) Back when I did, my roommate once came out of the shower to find some random woman hanging out in our living room watching TV

I thought I'd be able to case ILXor joints through this thread but I guess not.

Back when I did, my roommate once came out of the shower to find some random woman hanging out in our living room watching TV

Uh, what?! Did she think she was somewhere else or was she just crazy?

i always lock my doors. i'm a city kid; i'm not trusting.

i saw a woman at the laundromat last week who left her wallet and phone on one of the folding tables and walked away to attend to something else. i was baffled. PEOPLE STEAL SHIT; you must be really naive if you think they don't.

^^ I do stuff like this all the time - like leave my bag in a shopping cart at the grocery store and then wander into another aisle before realizing that I've done so. I've been pretty lucky.

Someone did steal my bag and shoes from a bar once.

I lock the doors before we go to bed, and when we're out. Lock them if I'm in alone and in the shower/taking a nap upstairs, otherwise they stay unlocked if one or both of us is in.

(b) Back when I did, my roommate once came out of the shower to find some random woman hanging out in our living room watching TV

i think i saw a movie about this actually

i once made the mistake of hanging my coat on a bar's coat rack and leaving my discman in the pocket. when i went to retrieve my coat at the end of the night, the discman was gone. i wasn't that torn up about it, except i had a mix cd i really liked in there and i was pissed it was gone.

Yeah, I'd put my bag and shoes (was at the beach!) under my chair and someone just swiped them both. I mean my shoes, really? I had to go home barefoot and buy new ones the next day. Bad had brand new digital camera and phone in it. Completely crappy experience but I try to be more careful now.

Funnily enough I leave my stuff on the beach, too, at least while I go swimming. But I go to a not-as-populated beach with mostly families, and I leave my stuff where I can see it from the water, and I put my towel over my bag so it's less visible.

I am constantly seeing people here in the greated Chicagoland leaving their car running while they poke into Starbucks or Subway or whatever. There are many times I've been tempted to hop in and park the car on the other side of the lot to teach them a much needed lesson. But then I realize I don't want a police record containing grand theft auto.

Did she think she was somewhere else or was she just crazy?

According to roommate reports, she said she thought it was her friend's place, but in a shifty / lying / excuse way. I think the explanation we settled on was that she came in to steal stuff to sell for drugs but then got junkyishly tired or distracted and sat down for a second? Or else heard him coming down the hall and decided to sit down and pretend to be confused.

Back when I did, my roommate once came out of the shower to find some random woman hanging out in our living room watching TV

i was once this dude watching TV

I think I'd like to hear that story.

I also bet these poll results are going to breakdown geographically. I lock all the doors, when I'm inside and out, because I live in on a busy street next to a busy store in a busy, big city and I most definitely do NOT want any of the people who meander around on the sidewalk in front of my house to come in and watch TV/borrow sugar/kill me.

so selfish

Also, we lock our apartment door even though we are already behind a locked building door and a locked gate. We have a downstairs neighbor who likes to wander around our building with his pants undone and probably drunk and I really don't want him going into our apartment by mistake, either.

xp haha, I know. Hoarding all of that TV and sugar and lifeforce for ourselves...

I was crashing at an old friend's place for the night. She was dropping me off and then going to pull an all nighter as she had a final the next day. Her roommate did not appear to be in the house on our arrival late on a weeknight, so "she's probably staying with her bf. Make yourself at home, feel free to take my bed, I'll see you for breakfast tomorrow before you go?" She leaves.

Fast forward a few minutes and I hear pipes squeak. Hm. A few minutes later they squeak again. Then a girl in a towel comes down the stairs.

"Um."
"*scream*"

^ guess which is me and which is her

i always scream when confronted by strange, towel-clad women!

I used to have dreams all the time of being caught inside someone else's house.

Do any apartment-dwellers here with doors that stay locked toggle the little switch so they don't lock? I can't imagine many people would, unless they lived right next to the laundry room or something. The only apartment doors I've ever even thought about leaving unlocked were back-deck doors in Chicago, which are tempting to leave open when you're home and it's hot.

I latch the screen door if I do that, although that's more to keep the dumb cats from escaping into the mean streets than out of any sense of security. I usually only open that door when I've burned something while cooking and need to clear the smoke, though (it's not really a deck, just standard issue back steps w/ wooden landings).

There are people in my apartment building that will leave the front gate propped open, and I will close it if I don't see anyone in immediate view. The neighborhood has gentrified a lot since I first moved there, but still, it is Oakland.

standard issue back steps w/ wooden landings

The whole exterior-wooden-stairs thing is SO Chicago/Grand Rapids to me. No part of NYC has anything like that, that I know of.

See, some of these things, finding a random bloke in the house, being burgled (twice), have happened to us but on all those occasions the doors were locked and the fuckers broke something to get in. Now we live in the 'burbs and I am seriously happier letting the kids (and their friends) (and their friends parents looking for their kids) wander in and out than worrying about axe murderers or lsoign my laptop*. I mean, really, how many axe murderers are there? The odds are on my side I think. Wait I think I hear someone in the porch...

*it's fully insured and backed-up tho' just in case.

i always keep my shit locked because of safety/privacy and because i'm paranoid about keeping the cats in. some of my friends keep their house unlocked all the time and friends are basically free to drop by, and i admire this but couldn't live like that.

The whole exterior-wooden-stairs thing is SO Chicago/Grand Rapids to me.

I can't speak to Grand Rapids, but yes, it is v. v. Chicago. It's also kind of bizarre to me, because if those stairs are supposed to function as fire escapes, shouldn't they be something that is not flammable? Did we learn nothing in 1871?

I've been way more casual about leaving doors open when I've lived in small towns/rural areas, but the sheer volume of foot traffic (and drunk/crazy ppl) near my apartment is enough to make the odds of avoiding unwanted contact with crazy drunk/ppl way too unfavorable to risk an open door policy. There's probably a lot to be said for a lifestyle choice that would allow me to feel safe with the doors wide open, buuuuuut right now, lock-down level paranoia feels like a small price to pay for the perks of city life.

Funnily enough I leave my stuff on the beach, too

Nah Laurel I meant to say that this was at a bar on the beach so it was pretty much entirely my fault for leaving my things unattended around drunk people.

so what do u guyz do when u find out the call is coming from inside the house????

I don't answer the phone to begin with.

sometimes I say Lucy I'm Home when I walk into a apts. w/ open doors

I've been way more casual about leaving doors open when I've lived in small towns/rural areas,

small towns/rural areas have their share of crazy drunks and meth heads, esp. poor towns. those guys can actually be scarier because there are fewer eyes on the street.

The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

There are parts of rural NC that I find scarier than parts of Chicago, but without focusing on notable exceptions, I would be more likely to lock my doors (while at home or while away) in the city than in rural or suburban areas.

My front door locks when you shut it, which is a pain in the ass. At my previous apartment, I did not lock it while at home, and very often not while I was asleep, but almost always when I was away. Except when I was running and didn't want to carry a key.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Someone's casing the joint of one voter.

the 3 ppl i live w/ are all incessant door lockers. totally annoying when i come home and they're sitting a metre away from the door watching the tv and i have to drop everything and find the key and unlock it. this happens basically nightly.

xp they better not keep their CDs in binders, ffs!

do u rob them when they are at an italian restaurant or a mexican one?

when they're at a taco truck, of course.

but then they will rush home to use the bathroom

no, they shit themselves at the restaurant after they saw this guy's bottle opener

no, they will be in a state of ecstasy conferred by the magical quality of food prepared from a vehicle that they will be in no rush to go home. They might also be wasted.

oh, so they will die in dui crash, so they don't need their stuff anymore

probably the fault of someone not checking their blind spot

Uh if we close the door, it's closed. So no way to get back in if you don't have a key.
But in the back it's completely open. The door is even open most of the time. Unsafe?
I guess but all in all you'd have to climb over the neighbour's gardenwall to get in and that's pretty difficult considering the neighbourhood we live in. Also, if we lose or forget our key, we can just ask the neighbour to climb over the wall.

There are many times I've been tempted to hop in and park the car on the other side of the lot to teach them a much needed lesson.

I see cars outside my post office running for nearly 20 minutes, and I feel the same way.

I work in an area with a shoplifting problem and no wonder! People will leave bags open and unattended ALL THE TIME.

didn't see this poll, but i would have doubled the no vote

I see cars outside my post office running for nearly 20 minutes, and I feel the same way.

I'd just take the keys and throw them away.

I missed this poll, or there'd be two NO votes. We don't even have keys for our house.