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I made a closet map

Life has been a bit nuts since the baby has come.  One of the surprises I’ve had to deal with is how quickly we go through clothing sizes.  We’re saving all of the kiddo clothes because we are planning on having another.  This means we need some sort of storage approach for all of the baby clothes as we go through it.

Our approach has been to store it in plastic tubs, organized by size.

Tubs ordered by size.

The closet we’re using to store all of the clothing is underneath our basement stairs.  This means that it’s not going to be fun to pull the clothing out as it’ll be buried behind other stuff and we don’t have line of sight to all of the things in the closet.  The other problem we’ll have is that I’ll have no idea what is where in a few years when we actually need it again.

My solution was to build a closet map.  Using a quickly made sketch of the basement closet and a small piece of Lexan, I created a whiteboard “map” for the closet.

The final product, I’m never going to remember where the maternity clothes are hiding.

The project was easy and cost me about $4.50 in parts.

What you need:

  • Piece of Lexan
  • 4 washers
  • 4 screws
  • Level (you have a level right?)
  • Screw driver 
  • Drill
  • Your map
Lexan is a trade name for polycarbonate, a clear plastic that is extremely strong and durable.  You can find it at Lowe’s or Home Depot and comes with a protective film on both sides.

From here it was pretty straight forward, I added four anchors to the wall (using the level to make sure everything was straight), then used the washers to hold the map and lexan in place.

Anchors installed
Hopefully I’m saving myself a few weeks of searching for the maternity clothes the next time we need them.

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The Home Alarm Post: FrontPoint Security

Following our burglary, we had an alarm system installed.  After way, way too long, I’ve finally written about the alarm system we went with.  Looking at the different options, we went with FrontPoint Security.

I went with FrontPoint for four reasons:

  1. Excellent customer support.
  2. Self install.
  3. Transparent pricing.
  4. I liked the technology.

1. Customer Service

The customer service is indeed awesome, setting up an alarm system is a high touch activity and it required many calls with them to get my questions answered and to setup the sensors.  They are super friendly and super knowledgeable on the phone.  The tech support are not a bunch of wankers reading off of a script, they really do know how the systems work, and when they don’t, they know how to get help.
Example:
I wanted a glass break sensor in my kitchen, they recommend you don’t do that because if you drop a plate or glass and it breaks, you can trigger the alarm.  I called them and asked them to move the glass break sensor into the “away” sensor group, this isn’t a common request and they were able to handle it easily.
My biggest complaint about customer service is the hours:
5:00 AM – 8:00 PM PST M-F
7:00 AM – 3:00 PM Sat-Sun
Naturally, I’d rather have them be 24/7.  The service hours are definitely east coast biased.

2.  Self Install

My wife wasn’t in a good place, and I didn’t want to deal with an installer after the break in. I wanted the system in fast and FrontPoint next day aired me everything (for free).  The self install can’t be any simpler, with the exception of the (optional) recessed door sensors, everything is tool-less and only requires you to use the sticker adhesive the units come with to install things to the walls or doors/windows.  I was leery that an installer would just cost more money and I didn’t want them in my house.  

3. Transparent Pricing

The pricing is *mostly* transparent.  You’ll know right away what you’ll spend on equipment and you’ll know what the monthly fee is.  What they don’t tell you until after you’ve signed up (but within the 30-day no questions asked period) is that you pay a $10 fee to the city (divided into four $2.50 payments, one per quarter).  This is required and it was the only surprise fee.

4. The Technology

I like the technology, it’s all based on z-wave, cellular,  and GE Security (which isn’t part of GE) has a strong position in the market, you can also buy sensors from other companies if you want and more importantly, you can buy sensors elsewhere.  I purchased  many sensors off of e-bay and the Frontpoint techs had no problem installing them.  Now that I have the system, I’m going to start adding environmental sensors.  I like

Notes from my installation:

Sensor Placement:

Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of documentation on how to do this right, here’s what I did:
My theory was that every egress point should have two different monitors on it.  Every door and window that is accessible without a large ladder has a sensor on it.  These trigger when the window or door is opened (the sensor is a magnet and a steel rod, when the magnet doesn’t sense the rod, the alarm goes off).
In addition, each window/door is covered by either a glass break sensor or is very close to a motion sensor.  I have mixed feelings on the glass break sensors.  There isn’t an easy way to test them, so I don’t actually know if they work.  It’s more faith than I’d like to have in an alarm system, but, they’re secondary to other sensors.
My thinking is, that if someone breaks the glass and doesn’t open the window, I’ll still catch them within my house.
I have no motion sensors in dog areas, the basement is protected by a glass break sensor and the openable windows and door have sensors.
If you are going to mount a motion sensor, the trick is to mount them higher to compensate for your dog, the motion sensors have a 90 degree frame of view on the horizontal but a very small field of view on the vertical, mounting them higher should prevent a dog from triggering them but you’ll want to test it.

Control Panel

I mounted the control panel in an easily accessible place, it’s powered off of a large power brick which I installed inside a closet, drilled a whole through the wall and wall mounted my panel.  You can actually mount the panel anywhere as you almost never use it (we use our phones to arm/disarm), it is good to have near your main point of egress (as opposed to the main door on the house if you don’t use that), because it’s likely you’ll inadvertently trigger the alarm and you’ll want to shut it off quickly.  The main concern with placing your panel is that it isn’t visible from the street, you don’t want bad guys to see if it’s disarmed or not.
FrontPoint is very proud of the “Crash and Smash” protection.  Once a sensor is triggered, there is a time delay before the system goes into alarm.  This time delay is there so that the homeowner can get to the panel and disarm the alarm.  A bad guy can use this delay to their advantage by destroying the control panel before it sends the “alarm” signal to the monitoring center.  Crash and Smash protection means that the alarm sends an “alarm pending” message to the control center immediately*, if the control panel is disarmed before the timeout, the panel sends an “alarm cancel” message.  If the panel is destroyed, the alarm goes into effect.
*Immediately is very subjective and I couldn’t get a real answer from FrontPoint on what the latency is from sensor triggered to “alarm pending” message received by the monitoring center.  I’d love to know, what it is, but I can’t find any info online.

Things I wish FrontPoint did better:

  • 24/7 customer service (or at least more West Coast friendly).
  • Better guidance on sensor placement, particularly glass break sensors.
  • Publish panel latency and incident response time.
  • Online account management, want to update your credit card?  You need to call them.
  • Not really FrontPoint, but I would love an outdoor rated door sensor, something I can put on my gates.
  • I’d also like a hard wired smoke alarm option.  All of my other smoke alarms are hard wired, so in theory, it’d be easy to hard wire a compatible alarm in that notifies the control center when any of my alarms go off.
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We had a break-in

Sadly, we suffered a break-in earlier in December.  It was an interesting experience that I learned a lot from.  Most surprisingly is that I wasn’t angry that we had a break-in, more disappointed.  Some of the things I did to prevent or minimize the damage of a break-in worked, and other things didn’t.  From my perspective, it was only a matter of time before we were targeted.  The city of Seattle has a real problem with burglary, from January-August of 2013, burglary rates are up 23% already.  Bring up the subject at a party and everyone there will either have been a victim or will know multiple victims.  It’s a fact of life if you live in the city.

Do you know this woman?   

If you think you know who she is, send me an e-mail at koz <at> kozknowshomes.com.

The Story

I came home around 7:00 PM.  As soon as I got home, I knew something was wrong because of the noises coming from the house.  Ransacking is a very distinct sound!  Instead of doing the obvious thing and calling the police immediately, I opened the front door.  Once I opened the door, I was sure there were  people in the house and I called the police.  To their credit, Seattle PD arrived within 5 minutes, but the burglars heard me place the call and ran out of the house before the police got to the house.  Thankfully, they took off without actually taking anything.
After looking at the camera footage, it was clear that the burglars were in the house for maybe 5-6 minutes (certainly less than 10).  The burglars got in via the door in the basement and went straight to our bedroom, in the few minutes they were in the house, they caused about $1,000 in damage.  They damaged my gate, broke the window in the back door, toppled a dresser and broke a shelf in my closet.  They had filled a laundry basket with “loot”, where “loot” is a euphemism for costume jewelry and an old xbox.  My guess is the items in the basket would pawn for less than $300.
For the curious, here are the videos of Bonnie and Clyde scoping my house:
Entryway camera, you can see my car pull into the driveway at the very end:
Here’s the carport camera:

I’d taken some steps to make my house a less attractive target, I covered some of these actions in a previous blog posts.  Some of these worked, others didn’t.

Things that worked:

  • Safe Deposit Box
  • Cameras
Things that didn’t work:
  • Gate locks
  • Alarm System Sign
  • Lighting
  • Back Door
  • Me

Things that worked:

Safe Deposit Box:

This is a no brainer, we don’t keep anything of “real” value in our house, the important documents and what little extra-fancy jewelry we have, we keep in a safe deposit box.  If you want to keep these things at home, then get a safe.  If you get a safe, MAKE SURE YOU BOLT IT TO THE WALL OR FLOOR.  A safe doesn’t do you any good if the bad guy can walk off with it.

Cameras:

Keep in mind, cameras are not prevention.  Let’s repeat that just to be clear: cameras are not prevention.  What the cameras did do for me was create evidence that I then gave to the police.  They were very interested in the footage.  The cameras also did a great job in letting my wife and I see exactly what kind of criminal was targeting us.  It’s clear from the video that these aren’t exactly high end cat burglars but instead people who randomly picked our house.  If you look at the first few seconds of the video, you realize that the woman scoped a neighbors house while the man scoped ours.  If  she had been a little bit faster with screening my neighbors, we may not have been hit at all.  Being able to see this was really good, particularly for the Mrs., she was MUCH calmer about the incident after seeing the video.

Things that didn’t work:

Gate Locks

I had installed keyed gate locks to my gates thinking that this would deter theft as the bad guy wouldn’t be able to get into the back yard.  This was naive on my part, instead of deterring the thieves, they broke through my gate.  If I’m going to keep my gates locked going forward, I’ll have to reinforce the gates so that they can’t be broken so easily.  Repairing the gate was a few hundred dollars.

Alarm System Sign

I don’t believe in the effectiveness of alarm systems for deterring  theft, I figured anyone who would be deterred by the alarm system would be deterred by the sign too.  I purchased a genuine alarm system sign off of eBay.  It didn’t matter.

Lighting

You can tell from the video that the front of my house is very well lit, my backyard is also well lit by a high intensity LED flood light.  None of the lighting deterred the thieves, they ripped the light off the wall in the backyard, which was another few hundred to fix.  Oddly enough, my neighbor’s house is completely black and they skipped right past it, go figure.

Back Door

I had put in a new back door, with an elevated dead bolt so that you couldn’t reach it through the dog door.  I also mounted the door so that it opened outwards to prevent people from being able to kick it in.  What I hadn’t done (yet) was reinforce the window in the door, Bonnie and Clyde threw a paver through the window.  This cost me $350 and a full day of vacuuming, we’re still finding bits of tempered glass in the house.

Me

I heard the sounds as soon as I opened the door to my car.  I *should* have called the police at that moment and put distance between me and them.  Instead, like an idiot, I opened the front door and peaked in.  Thankfully I didn’t get hurt and they took off when they heard my voice, but I had no idea if they were dangerous or not.

Changes I’ve made

There are two main changes I’ve made since the break-in.  I replaced the glass in the back door with double pane, double laminate glass.  This is similar to the glass in a car windshield, instead of shattering into a million pieces (like tempered glass), it’ll “spider” because the layer of plastic between the glass will keep the glass together.  Throwing a brick at this will break the glass but not allow entry to the home.  Even if the bad guy gets through the first pane, they will have to get through a second pane.
Here’s a random video from the internet comparing the two types of glass:
I’ve also installed an alarm system.  To be clear, I don’t think an alarm system will stop a break in.  What an alarm will do, is prevent my wife or I from walking in on a crime in progress.  I also think the alarm will limit the amount of time the burglars can spend in the house and protect us while we’re not in town.  There are some other advantages that aren’t security related that I’ll talk about in a future blog post about the alarm system I chose.