If I pull my front door closed behind me, it can’t be pushed or pulled upen from the outside. On the inside, I have to pull aside a latch to open it. But stricktly speaking it isn’t locked.
In theory, the door could now be opened by a clever guy cleverly manouvring with a credit/card-like-device. You can Google your own Youtube burglar-how-to vids for instructons on how to do this.
If I then use a key to lock the door, it can only be opened with that key.
In that sense, my doors are only locked (with a key) at night. Otherwise they are just pulled and clicked shut.
It is reputed that I live in one of the most crime-ridden parts of Melbourne (Australia). My front door is always locked because I never use it. But I lost my backdoor key and didn’t have it replaced for nearly nine months, so left the door unlocked. My car auto-locking thingamagig has shat itself, so unless I manually lock it (and more often than not I forget!), it’s open from the time I drive home from work until I leave again the next morning.
Our doors are never locked, partly because the keys have all been lost due to chronic disuse. But, it’s a rural location and we are the last house of three on a dead-end private lane. We have strategically placed motion-lights to help us go to the barn when it is dark out. Plus, our dogs are known killers. (joke. Through the grapevine we heard a rumor that our dogs are vicious. We intentionally have never corrected the misunderstanding.)
Even if I had the option of leaving the front door unlocked (see below) I wouldn’t. A moment’s effort for a night-time’s peace.
Back doors could be unlocked while at home if you have a large dog that needs to get in and out (small dogs could use a doggy-door). But then you have the large dog…
Yeah, it must be very unusual. I’ve never seen it anywhere in the UK, even at ancient houses, farms, etc. There will always be exceptions to everything on Earth except gravity, though; there’s probably even an exception to that, that I’m sure someone on here could think of.
I live in the middle of downtown of a city that’s been absorbed by Toronto. I lock my back door only when we’re going away for the weekend or longer although the gate into the back yard is locked so someone would have to climb a 7’ fence to get to my back door.
The front door is locked when we’re away but never when we’re home.
Anyone opening and unlocked door however would be confronted by two boxers who spend a lot of their time sitting in the front window growling at anyone who ventures too close to the house. No one else needs to know that the likely consequence of coming through the door would be being licked to death or covered in dog hair.
Yeah, I used to live in a place with one of those doors. I did keep a key hidden, but it was always several blocks away on some sort of commercial property that had little decorative stones or something like that. And I would go somewhere else after hiding it and if I had to go retrieve it I would hide it somewhere different the next time.
This hints at the other thing I was wondering: if the non-locking people are just not bothering to lock, or if they almost stubbornly refuse to lock as a point of pride. Either as an emblem of not living in fear, a more open, welcoming attitude toward the world around them, a kind of implicit assertion or even social contract that they are not living in the kind of place that would require locking one’s doors, perhaps harkening back to a simpler and (perceived as) less violent era…or something else I’m not thinking of.
And if so: does it bother you that I, and it seems about half of us, are locking our doors? Or is it a totally individual choice thing for you?
(FYI: it does not bother me that you don’t lock, although when I mentally test that claim I hesitate slightly if you do have small children.)
BTW it does seem like having dogs makes it less necessary to lock one’s door. I used to have a couple big dogs and the guarding presence they provided was a bonus (plus the cute and cuddliness and all that); but ultimately they were too much work for a slacker like me.
Yeah, that’s what I meant by ‘automatically locked’, in that the door can’t be opened from the outside without a yale key or some burglaring trickery. If I physically leave the house, I also, use a secondary key - a mortice lock, so the door is effectively double locked.
Yes, always. I grew up in a very rural (bordering on farmland) town in the Midwest, now live in an extremely low-crime suburb of Chicago.
My parents grew up on Midwestern farms. I gather the triggering event for locking the door was when they learned a murderer drove right down our deserted little rural road while making his escape, and the thought of what might have happened if he decided he needed to hide out/get another vehicle/get a hostage disturbed them. A lock gives you a little time, and will discourage a casual, opportunity-seeking thief.
I have a friend who lives on a farm in a super-rural unincorporated area of Virginia, and she deals with crime in her area that I’ve never personally encountered in over a decade of working in Chicago. She’s had someone try her door during the middle of the night. She has neighbors who’ve had their houses burglarized.
Living in rural areas is super-safe, until it isn’t.
When I was growing up (in a big city) the front door was unlocked until bedtime. When my kids were small, the same. When the youngest turned 10 and my wife went out to work, we started locking in the day time. The back door is locked all winter (and late fall and early spring), but is generally left unlocked all day unless we go out, then locked when we go to bed. However, we don’t lock the dead bolt until we go to bed. And we undo the button when we are working in the front garden or when a workman has to go in and out repeatedly.
But when we moved in to this house, our next door neighbor mentioned that she didn’t think her front door had ever been locked. Even when they went on vacation, apparently.
As an aside; my sister lives in a rural area and only recently had locks installed on all doors to keep the police out.
She returned from work to find a state police car parked in her drive. Fearing the worse, she ran into the house. A cop was sitting at her kitchen table, doing paperwork. He claimed he was investigating a 911 call originating from her landline. Only nobody was home. Her husband pressed the issue, but got nowhere.
Basically, her home was entered and searched by the police who were unable/unwilling to show proof their actions were justified. So now her home is locked so that she feels safe from law enforcement.
Those of you who lock the door: Do any of you have kids, who play outside? If so, how does that work?
When I was growing up, we had people going in and out of the house all the time. It wouldn’t have worked to keep the doors locked.
So, I don’t keep my door locked during the daytime when I’m at home, mainly because I’m unconsciously following the practice I grew up with. I absorbed the notion that what door locks are for is to keep people (burglars?) out when you’re not home, or when you’re in bed for the night. What burglar is going to come in and steal your stuff while you’re sitting there watching them?
Thanks to this thread, I’m thinking now maybe I should start keeping my door locked. Even though I’ve never had any problems, except for that one time somebody opened my front door, saw me there, and said, “Oops! Wrong apartment!” (in what I believe was an honest mistake). The downside to keeping my door locked, I guess, is that if I had some kind of medical emergency no one would be able to get in to help me.
I live in Chicago suburbia. Front door is always locked but that’s just a function of it being rarely used. I don’t lock the back door when I’m home except maybe before bed. My wife does when she notices it unlocked but she was raised in Lima, Peru where apparently the risk of someone with a machine gun entering your home was a lot greater than in Plainfield, IL.
I’ve been known to leave the back door unlocked when running short errands. Growing up, we almost never locked the front door. Ironically, the one time the house was robbed the burglar kicked and broke the back door lock while the front door was completely accessible.
I’m nearly in the country. There’s a cornfield across the street, another directly to our west. A car goes by about four times an hour. No, we don’t need to lock the door.
We enter and exit our home through the garage, and during the day the garage door is usually open all day, and the swing door from the garage to the house is unlocked. When I get home at night, I close the garage door and usually lock (deadbolt) the entry door. But every now and then, I leave the garage door up and the entry door unlocked, like if I think I will need to get back outside for something. Maybe once a month I forget about it and we go to bed with them like that.
We don’t use the front door unless someone rings the bell. That doesn’t happen often because most friends and family just come in through the garage door.
The slider to the deck is usually open during the day, except in winter, and about once a month I’ll come down in the morning and realize we forgot to close/lock it the night before.
Sometimes. At first, we rarely locked it, then an acquaintance let himself in, so we started keeping the door locked, but time has passed and we’ve fallen back into old habits.
There are times, when the weather is nice, that the front door is wide open. If it’s raining or really hot or cold out and one of the dogs wants to go out, we’ll leave the back door open, so they aren’t stuck outside longer than necessary.
If we’re home during the day, the front door is probably unlocked. As Thudlow Boink points out, this is convenient when you have kids coming and going all of the time. Also, I don’t want to have to carry my keys when I take the dog for a walk. I usually make sure that the front door is locked after all pets are inside around 10pm.
The side and back doors we intend to have locked all of the time, but we occasionally forget to lock them.
I’m in an inner suburb. By US suburban standards, I don’t think I can say it’s a low-crime area. I spend a lot of time worrying about a lot of things, but crime just isn’t one of them.
