Costa del Sol One bedroom apartment wanted rental period February 21 to March 13, 2009

To select an appartment door for quick and quiet forced entry a theif will generally push the top and bottom righthand corner of a door as you face it from the outside. A firm push in these two areas will tell him if the door is locked, i.e closed and keys turned in the lock to extend the heavy duty bolts located at the top middle and bottom of the door or if it has just been pulled closed and the latched but not locked.

With the bolts engaged by correctly locking the door it would take considerable time and effort , not to nention noise to open the door. If the door is only latched it takes around 15 seconds with a flexible paint scraper and hardly makes any noise.

One good way to avoid being targetted is to ensure that the door is closed and locked with the key. the dor is not locked if you just close it.

I'm afraid I don't have sufficient knowledge of how easy or difficult it is to break in through the front door, so I'll take your word on that.

We always, without exception double lock the front door when we are in or out.  In our case with the break in that we experienced in November it must have been considerably noisy because there was considerable  damage to the door. This happened during the middle of the afternoon over a 2 hour period and nobody heard anything. I don't thing there is anyone else in our block.

This message was last edited by Paul and Di on 12/21/2007.

Hi, from what we understood after our break in during the summer both top and bottom lock on the apartment door open when the middle lock is jemmied so neither lock is independant they just obviously are locked further into the door jam when double locked,but only need middle lock to be jemmied, this is obviously made easier if the metal security cover on the door jam isn't fitted which our builders didn't see fit to include on our apartments.The thieving !!!! need only jemmy wood instead of manouvering around the metal.Also in our case our apartment door would never have double locked properly as the carpenter had never chiselled deep enough for the lock to open fully when double locked, this we also only discovered after the break in unfortunatley. Secure and protect as much as you can is the only way to be safe and then who knows,luck also plays a large part. Anyway forget all that for the moment and heres wishing a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS AT THE MIRADOR AND LOOKING FORWARD YO SEEING YOU ALL IN THE SUNNY NEW YEAR. Heres counting down the days,we are out on new years day until the 6th and then easter so see you all soon xxxx  PS loved the ecard Max,Ian looked especially fetching I thought.xxxLove Andy and Sue xx