The Tuesday before Thanksgiving while we were out of town visiting family our house got broken into. Obviously this isn’t something that really makes me happy, but if my house had to get broken into I’m happy for how it went down. He apparently forced open the window next to our back door and let himself in. It actually was for the best that this happened while we were out of town. Normally on a Tuesday morning my husband would have been home working in our basement. Who knows what would have happened if he had come upstairs when he heard someone walking about?

Also because we were out of town all the stuff I think the guy was hoping to take in a quick snatch and grab wasn’t here. We both had our laptops, cell phones, and iPads with us as well as our wallets of course. Although we of course have lots of stuff I suspect much of it doesn’t have good street resale value aside from the stuff that we had taken with us. He didn’t even bother with our tv I suspect because of its size.

He also didn’t seem to go upstairs at all. All of our bedroom doors were still closed and none of the drawers were opened. I don’t have a lot of it, but the jewelry I do own was thankfully all still there. The only thing we could find missing once we got home was our spare house and car keys. Again thankfully my car was still there. Once my husband noticed those were gone I was worried he stole my car, but we went outside and it was still parked on the street where I left it. It didn’t even seem like he got into it at all, which is surprising given that it was actually parked very close to our house for a change and would have been easy to find by clicking the alarm on the key fob. I park on the street, so I never keep anything of value in my car not even loose change, so he wasn’t going to find anything there even if he did look. Perhaps the fact that I drive a manual transmission kept him from being able to actually take the car itself, or maybe he found the street in front of our house too crowded to be able to do anything with the car. I don’t know, but I’m glad it was still there.

Also it’s lucky that he left the back door open when he left. The cat thankfully didn’t run away even though the door was open all day long, but it alerted our friend who was watching our cat for us that someone had been in the house. So little was touched or taken that had that door not been open it might have been quite some time before we realized that someone had broken in and taken our keys and broken the lock on our window.

It feels super creepy that someone out there has keys to our car and house, but most of that is fixable. We’ve already replaced the locks on the house and replaced the broken lock on the window. Apparently the window lock wasn’t super great, which in some respects seems bad but in other ways is good because it means he didn’t break the glass in the window like he did to the house next door. I obviously can’t do much about the fact that he has my car key other than to hope he never decides to come back for it. You can’t really change your car locks like you can the ones on your house.

At any rate if the only thing we have to do is replace our locks and the stupidly expensive car keys, then we got off pretty easy. Maybe there’s someone more we haven’t realized is missing yet, but really if there is it’s just stuff. Most importantly we weren’t home and are safe, our friend didn’t come over to feed the cat and surprise him in the process, and our cat is still here. I hope we never have to go through this again, but I’m happy that since we did it was such a minimal issue. It could have been a lot worse.