Back when our house was built there was little cause for giving much thought to securing a garage. In fact, so slight was the concern that the door to the backyard had a single pane of glass and a basic handle set, which is a sweet set-up for today’s thieves. First, they can window shop to see if there is anything they’d like to have or sell. If access cannot be quickly gained using a credit card on the standard lockset, breaking out the window on the door would be no problem.
Don’t try to tell the guys at Oregon Carpenters, Inc. that eliminating the window and adding a deadbolt would fix things either. It’s a good start, but they’ve replaced plenty of kicked-in door jambs on windowless doors with a deadbolt.
Properly installing a deadbolt with the security plate thoroughly anchored into the framing eliminates intrusion by small or lazy crooks, but the experienced break-in artist knows that some well placed blows will cause the door edge to spread open and the deadbolt to hinge out of and past the jamb. When you will type how to open a lock door many tips and results you will get in google search engine.
It is often said that necessity is the mother of invention. That is certainly the case with a product called Door Jamb Armor, from Armor Concepts, LLC, which was born of a landlord’s quest to secure his properties and to prevent costly repairs from break-ins. The system provides the structural characteristics of a steel-framed door and is designed to both reinforce a jamb against break-in or to repair a jamb that has been kicked in.
The product he developed was just what we needed to complete the security measures we planned to apply to our vulnerable door.
In the end our door got a triple beef-up by replacing the glass with wood, installing a deadbolt, and installing a Door Repair and Security Kit by Door Jamb Armor. While we were at it, we did some door and trim repairs, so the entire job was not only practical but pretty as well.
Lights Out
A window in a door is called a light, but this light wasn’t very bright. Not only did it allow trespassers the opportunity to survey the contents of the garage, it was installed in the days prior to tempered glass, which made it dangerous in the event of accidental breakage.
We took the door off the hinges, put it on saw horses and used a putty knife to determine which side of the door had removable stops to hold in the glass. Next, we used a utility knife to cut the paint and caulking between the window stop molding and the door frame. We then used the putty knife to loosen and remove the stops by bowing them in the center to relieve pressure on the inside miters. We then numbered each stop and its location on the door jamb.
After removing the glass and measuring it, we cut a piece of plywood the same size as the glass panel and installed it in the door frame. We found that we needed to rip down the stops because the plywood was thicker than the glass. Then we used a finish nailer to re-install the stops that hold the plywood panel in place.
Harder Hardware
With the window out of the picture, it was time to address the single door latch, which was vulnerable to being “carded” (opened using a credit card to push back the locking mechanism).
We used the door armor from the Door Jamb Armor kit as a template to layout the location of the new deadbolt. We also used a GuideRight door installation kit to center the deadbolt holes in the right locations.
When we were drilling the 2-1/8-inch hole through the face of the door, we drilled until we could see the pilot bit of the hole-saw coming through the door and completed the hole from the opposite side of the door.