The Break-In
Day 164 - 28/02/2021
Sunday evening after a super relaxing day at the beach I made Lasagne. We were sitting on the terrace when I received a whatsapp from Erick. “Sorry to bother you, but they’re informing that someone was found inside your house. You haven’t been at the house today, have you?” I read the message and was confused. Who was they? What was going on? I replied: “No, we didn’t go. Who informed you about this?” Erick: “They published it on Facebook. That it happened next to Armando Renteria, which is your neighbour.”
My confusion was even bigger. Who published what on Facebook? I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying so I called him. He said something about “Vecinos Vigilantes” and that they posted something on Facebook about having caught someone climbing over a fence into my property.
Obviously this was serious. There’s tons of valuable stuff at the site. Stuff that’s not so easy to steal like my new fridge and stove and washing machine but also stuff that’s very easy to steal like smaller tools and new rolls of cable etc.
I explained to F and we decided that it’d be best to go to the house and have a look and see if everything’s ok.
It was already 10pm and dark so we armed ourselves with a flash light and a machete and drove to the house. We opened the gate and walked in. Two eyes stared at us from a distance. Luckily very obviously just a cat but either way my pulse was sky high. We slowly made our way through the property with F banging the machete on the floor to make noise in an attempt to scare anyone off that might be lurking around in the property. If anything he for sure managed to scare the shit out of me but luckily nobody else seemed to be in the property.
I had a look around and from what I could tell nothing was missing. I grabbed Erick’s tools and hid a few other things a bit more and we went back home.
It was obvious that I would have to do something about security in the place. F had already mentioned several times to me that the wall at the front of the house is super easy to jump and that I need to put a fence up, all the neighbours have fences up for a reason. I knew he was right but I hated the idea of an ugly fence so I was reluctant. I started to think what other options there could be and suggested a motion detector which would be quite easy to install and maybe not that expensive but obviously also not as effective.
The next day we went to the house and discussed options to tighten security around the house. I took some measures and was already about to head off to go buy some fencing wire when F suggested we could use some of the corrugated metal sheets that were lying around at the property. Brilliant. Ugly as hell but obviously just a “for the time being” solution and wouldn’t cost me any extra. With the help of Erick we managed to get it installed by end of day and I felt much better about having the place secured.
