Whether they work from home for their day jobs or simply want a place to take care of your their most important tasks and part-time ventures, more and more homeowners have added home offices to their houses. These spots create an invaluble place to stay task-oriented, with all required technology and work-related items at the ready at all times. However, due to the personal and often expensive nature of the items in these rooms, they also create a security risk. Of course laptops, monitors and television screens all have value to thieves. Furthermore, personal bank-related items such as credit cards, checks, and financial records often get stored in home offices. For these reasons, we recommend taking extra care to secure these important areas your house. In this post, we’ll share some best practices to create full home office security!
First, we’ll review how to set up your office layout as securely as possible. The less attractive you can make this room look from the outside of your home, the better. Then, we’ll show you how you can use alarm contacts to greater secure your home office. These will include some “standard” equipment options as well as some more creative ideas! From there, we’ll detail some safe options to help you secure your valuables within your office. Last but not least, we’ll also spend some time looking at locks that can add office security within your home. Now, let’s get started with an overview of how to set up your home office with security in mind.
Set Up Your Office Space with Security in Mind
A few years ago, we created a post sharing 5 Ways to Keep Your Home from Becoming a Target for Burglars. In that post, we discussed how thieves often “window shop” before breaking in to a home. In other words, burglars often case a neighborhood for evidence of valuables before choosing a home to victimize. These thieves will find homes with evidence of ready-to-grab electronics or valuables hard to resist. This rings especially true for items that can be grabbed after breaking a window without ever entering a home. Therefore, we recommend keeping evidence of any work-related valuables out of plain sight.
Contact sensors can add quite a bit of office security. In this case, an Alarm.com cellular dialer can let you know when doors outside of or within an office are opened.
Doing so can keep passers-by from seeing you using laptops, tablets, or other potentially expesive technology and making a note of it for a future burglary attempt. Now that we’ve looked at setting up your home working space, let’s take a look at some security equipment that can help you add home office security.
Install Additional Alarm Components
Burglars often look for money, electronics, and valuables while inside a victim’s house. This makes office security a special priority for two reasons. First and foremost, offices often contain these items, making them a specific target for burglars. In addition, the presence of such important items means that an office break in would create even more damage than a typical home burglary. For these reasons, we often suggest adding additional security system devices to home offices. A dedicated office motion detector, for example, can provide a closer watch over your office electronics than a centrally located motion detector in a hallway or other central location. Adding window sensors to office windows can catch potential burglars even more quickly.
In addition to making it harder to enter an office, you should also add equipment to track entry to the office even when your security system is disarmed. We’ve outlined several different uses for contact sensors in our post on Unconventional Uses for Contact Sensors. In this case, adding contact sensors to all office doors (as well as on drawers and closets within the office itself) allows you to track people entering the office and even track them within the office itself.
This is especially helpful when used in tandem with an interactive cellular dialer, such as ours powered by Alarm.com. Now if anyone opens an office door, you will receive an alert on your smart phone that lets you know. You can also receive an alert if someone leaves the office door open. If you do not receive an alert, you now have the peace of mind that when you go back to your office, everything will be as you left it. Next up, let’s see how you can use safes to add an extra measure of home office security.
Secure Your Work Documents
Safes can hide and shield the things that burglars covet most when they break into an office. People often use safes to keep money, important records and documents, and valuables such as jewelry or antique coins out of the wrong hands. Because offices often contain these items, many of our safe installations take place in offices. Make sure to follow our 10 Best Practices for Safes while choosing and installing the safe as well. Many people make mistakes during this process that hurt office security more than helping it. For example, buying a safe but failing to bolt it down to your floor simply invites burglars to walk off with your safe in hand. Doing this ensures the loss of both your safe and your valuables with potentially very little effort on the intruder’s part.
Wall safes, such as this model by AmSec, can help you both secure and hide your valuables.
Of course, the presence of a safe in the room can attract immediate attention. If you plan on storing relatively small items in your safe, consider purchasing a wall safe. To install a wall safe, we cut a square hole in the drywall and install the safe itself between the wall studs. You can then use a picture or mirror to cover the safe. This setup makes the safe both hard to find and hard to steal without a great amount of effort.
Other safes have their own specific purposes. Fire and burglary-specific safes, for example, are designed with exactly those threats in mind. Some safes offer security against both fire and a tool or torch attack by a burglar. When choosing a safe, keep in mind both what dangers you wish to guard against and what items you wish to lock up. Now, let’s shift our focus to installing some interior locks for to add security to your home office.
Choose Interior Locks That Add Security
Our post 6 Ways to Improve Door Security should help you hone in on how to make your office more difficult to enter. While that post focused mainly on exterior doors, consider using those same concepts to create home office security. Adding a doorknob with a lock, or even a deadbolt, means that anyone entering the office now needs a key to do so. This can make it harder for guests or anyone already in the house to intrude on your home office. It also helps add security in the case of a break-in. Burglars do not like to spend more than a few minutes in a home. Any bit of security that makes their next move more difficult can minimize the damage done by a break-in.
A keypad smart lock adds additional office security and tracking information. In addition to making office doors more secure, these locks can track which code was used to unlock it, and when. You can also use your phone to unlock these doors. This is very handy if you want to let someone in the office for a brief period of time, but do not wish to give out a code. No matter what type of lock option you choose, we always recommend adding locks to office doors to provide additional security.
Putting it All Together and Creating Complete Home Office Security
We hope that this post helps you add home office security within your own home. Furthermore, we invite you to contact us with any questions this post may raise for you. We will happily answer any and all of your security-related inquiries. Additionally, we also encourage you to have us out for a free site survey if you’d like to take advantage of the tips we’ve shared today. We offer this service to both new and existing customers alike. While on site, we can create a solution for any security concern you may have. Moreover, we can also make our own suggestions based on observations made during our visit. Together, we can create a complete security plan for every area of your home to keep you, your valuables, and your family as safe and secure as possible!