Possession day is chaos and security is the last thing on anyone’s mind. But the first week in a new house is the cheapest and easiest time to deal with all of this, because you are already living among boxes and nothing feels like a disruption.
Here is the list, in order of how much difference each one makes.
1. Rekey Every Exterior Door
You do not know how many keys to your new house exist. Previous owners, their adult children, a cleaner, a dog walker, the trades who worked on it before the sale, the listing agent, and a lockbox that a dozen buyer agents opened during showings. All legitimate at the time. None of it tracked.
Rekeying changes the pins inside your existing cylinders so every old key stops working. It costs a fraction of new hardware, keeps the finish you already have, and takes under an hour for a typical Whitby home. Ask for keyed alike so one key runs the front, back, side and garage doors.
New build? You still need this. During construction the property is typically on a builder’s key or a construction master held by trades across the entire subdivision. Some builders use a system where the first turn of the homeowner key cancels it — but it is often not fitted to every door and is sometimes never triggered. It takes two minutes to check.
2. Fix The Strike Plates
The single best value in home security, and almost nobody does it.
A standard strike plate is held by two short screws that reach only the jamb trim — a thin strip of wood nailed to the frame. One solid kick splits that trim and takes the strike with it, while your perfectly good deadbolt stays locked in a piece of broken timber.
A box strike with three-inch screws reaching into the structural stud, plus long screws in the top hinge, turns one quiet kick into a sustained noisy effort. Twenty minutes, and it does more than any lock upgrade at the same price.
3. Deal With The Garage
Two separate jobs and both get skipped.
The side entry door into the garage is usually the cheapest lock on the property, and it opens into an unobserved space. Treat it exactly like a front door.
The door from the garage into the house is very often a hollow interior door with a privacy handle. Once somebody is in the garage they are working on it completely out of sight of the street. It should be a solid door with a real deadbolt.
Then reset the opener. Old remotes and keypad codes travel with previous owners. Both can be cleared from the opener unit itself in a few minutes.
4. Change Every Smart Lock And Keypad Code
Including the installer or builder code, which is very often still the factory default. And make sure you hold the administrator account, not a previous owner and not the installer — if you cannot personally add and remove users, you do not control your own door.
5. Test Every Window Lock
Especially basement and ground-floor rear windows. On older homes downtown and around Port Whitby a fair proportion are painted permanently open, broken, or missing entirely. It costs nothing to walk round and try them, and an unlocked window defeats every lock you just paid for.
6. Find The Patio Door Pin
Most sliding doors have a secondary pin or bar option that almost no owner has ever used. A sliding door that can be lifted in its track is a five-second entry; one with a pin through the frame is not.
While you are there, check whether the door has to be lifted to move. If it does, the rollers and track need attention — and it is one storm from jumping the track entirely.
7. Walk The Property After Dark
This costs nothing and it is the most revealing thing on the list. Stand at the street and look at your house at ten at night. Which doors are invisible? Where would you approach from? Which shrubs give complete cover to somebody standing at your front door?
Lighting at side and rear entries and trimming back two bushes usually does more than several hundred dollars of hardware.
8. Write Down What You Have
Which doors were rekeyed, how many keys were cut, who has one, what the smart lock codes are and who holds the admin. It sounds bureaucratic for a house, and in two years when you are trying to remember whether the shed was included, you will be glad it exists.
The Order That Matters
If you only do two things this week: rekey the exterior doors, and fix the strike plates. Those two cover the overwhelming majority of realistic risk for very little money.
Everything else on this list is worth doing and none of it is urgent by comparison. See our new-home rekey service, or call 647-330-7919 and we will do the lot in one visit.
Locked Out? We Answer The Phone.
24/7 mobile locksmith service across Whitby, Brooklin and Durham Region. Real prices on the phone, a marked vehicle at your door, and a written invoice when we are done.
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