Repair nothing before the findings are taken
Marks on the leaf, the frame and the lock are part of what is recorded, and a door already put right can no longer be examined. Photograph it from several angles before anything is touched: the outer face, the cylinder area, the frame, the splinters. On the stone-bedded frames of Le Bourg the leverage shows in the timber around the keep, and those images will serve the insurer as much as the police.
The complaint and the insurance declaration come next, within the period your policy sets. Keep every part that is removed: a cylinder drilled on a Demi-Lune landing door, a torn-out lock, a split piece of frame from a house in Le Bourg. They show what kind of attack it was, and an insurer may well ask to see them. Note down the time at which you found the place too.
In the meantime a temporary closure shuts the home without erasing anything useful: a stopgap lock, the keep made good, a door off its hinges blocked, a broken glazed panel boarded over. In a block on the avenue Charles de Gaulle, tell the syndic as well if the hall door was forced, since the repair then concerns the whole building.
Fix the way in, not only the front door
A lock that has been attacked is compromised even if the key still turns: internal clearances have shifted and parts are already started. The frame deserves as much attention. In many break-ins it is not the mechanism that gives way but the timber around the keep, levered out, and a new mechanism screwed to a split frame solves only half the problem.
In Tassin the weak point is often somewhere other than the landing door. In Le Bourg, courtyards and back entrances offer a service door nobody ever looks at. At Alaï, Le Méginand and Vaubonne it is garage doors, garden gates and the glazed doors at the rear of the house. Those openings are dealt with at the same time as the main door.
Under the Demi-Lune blocks, cellars and shared basement rooms are visited as soon as the hall has been opened. If keys went missing with the ring, the cylinders on those secondary accesses have to be changed as well, otherwise the home is only half secured. The keyring is rebuilt one access at a time, letterbox included.
How does this service work?
Techniques, typical situations, standards and things to watch out for: it is all on our securing your home after a break-in page. This page focuses on what the service involves in Tassin-la-Demi-Lune.