Tuesday Thoughts About..

... safety and security:

There’s so much about home safety and security that is amazing. And so much to love! Buttttt, it can go terribly awry when you are remodeling—or away from home. 

Let me start by saying that we’ve had our “Ring” doorbell for several years now. We love it! Or at least we thought we did. Well, I’ve learned that only Butch and I get the alert that someone is at our door. Makes sense. After all it’s an app on our phones. Ordinarily it never mattered. But recently, it mattered. 

There were things being delivered for the remodeling project that the workers needed. We were alerted, but the guys never knew when things arrived. We'd get home and find that things were dropped off in the garage. 

Butch arranged for Mindy and Justin to be at our house on Halloween since we were in St. Louis. All of a sudden, our “Ring” kept going off. We noticed that the trick or treaters were ringing and then leaving. That’s when we realized that anyone inside the house would not know there were people at the front door. The doorbell rings on the app, not actually at the house! What a pain!

The ring alerted us constantly. The guys were in and out—they did as much of the dirty work outside as they could. That meant a lot of coming and going. A lot! It was particularly annoying when I was out and about with other people. I ended up keeping my phone on mute.

But, that didn’t solve the problem with the door alarms. When we moved in to this house in 1995, we had grand babies. We decided that we needed a security system that would alert us when someone went in or out a door. So, we had ALL the doors alarmed. Actually, I liked that because Butch was traveling so much. I liked the idea that if anyone came in the house, I would be alerted. Plus we wanted the added protection so we would know if the grands might go outside—because of the pool we didn’t want to take any chances. 

The door alerts have worked perfectly over the years. But during the remodel—OMGosh! They are alerting constantly. It gets pretty annoying. There might be a way to disable this feature, but I don’t know how to do it. I’ve found that the best thing is to just be gone while the workers are here.

Oh, and then there’s the fire alarm that went off at 2:30 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. That was due to all the dust from the remodel. But what if we were out of town? How in the world would we have been able to turn that off. Maybe it’s time to update the system and control that with our phones too. 

Or, we could stop remodeling. Yeah, that’s it. That would solve ALL our problems! Luckily, with the completion of this project, there isn’t anything left to do!

All of these safety and security measures are pretty great. I just never realized they could be so annoying at the same time!