New Home Security First Day | What to Change, In What Order, Before Tonight

You've just picked up the keys. The removal van is twenty minutes behind you. You've got a window, right now, before boxes start filling the hallway and your brain turns to mush, to sort the one thing that actually matters before you sleep here tonight.

The previous owner handed back their keys. Great. But you don't know who else has a copy. The estate agent. The cleaner. An ex-partner. The neighbour who fed the cat. The builder who did the kitchen three years ago and still has a spare knocking around in a kitchen drawer somewhere in Horley. You have no idea. Neither does the vendor, honestly.

This isn't a lecture about threat levels. It's a run-through of what to check, what to change, and what order to do it in so you're not wasting time or money.

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Start at the Front Door

Every other check flows from this one. Walk up to your front door and look at the cylinder, the barrel that your key goes into on the outside.

What is it? If it's a uPVC door, multipoint lock, or composite door, you've almost certainly got a euro cylinder. The keyhole is oval and sits roughly in the middle of the lock hardware. Good news: replacing it takes about ten minutes and costs £40 to £120 depending on the cylinder you choose.

What you're looking for right now:

• Is the cylinder proud of the door face by more than 3mm? Anything sticking out is a snap point. Euro cylinders that protrude can be gripped with pliers and snapped in under thirty seconds by anyone who's watched a single YouTube video.
• Can you see a brand name? Standard Yale or ERA cylinders that came with the house are almost always basic 1-star or unrated. They're fine for keeping the door shut in normal use, but they're not anti-snap, anti-pick, or anti-bump.
• Is the screw holding the cylinder accessible from outside? It shouldn't be.

What to do: Measure the cylinder before you do anything else. Take the door handle out of the equation, open the door, and remove the single screw on the interior face of the lock body. The cylinder slides out. Note the measurement: it's the distance from the centre of the screw hole to the outside face (the external side), and from the centre to the inside face. Written as, say, 35/45mm. Get that number right and buying the replacement is simple.

For a new home, the minimum I'd fit is a TS007 3-star cylinder. Ultion and Avocet ABS both make excellent ones. Mul-T-Lock and British Standard-rated cylinders are solid too. You're looking at £45 to £90 for the cylinder itself. If you're in a terraced or semi in Three Bridges, Ifield, or Broadfield where streets are dense and quick walk-by access is easy, don't cheap out here.

Fit the new cylinder, take all keys with you, and you've closed the biggest unknown of moving day in about fifteen minutes.

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Check the Lock Body Itself

The cylinder gets all the attention, but the lock body matters too.

If the door has a multipoint lock, check that all the hooks and rollers actually engage when you lift the handle and turn the key. On older uPVC doors in Crawley's late-90s and early-2000s housing stock, especially on the Maidenbower and Pound Hill estates, the gearboxes in these locks have often been failing for years. Vendors don't always disclose it.

Close the door from outside, lift the handle, and turn the key. Listen for all the points engaging. Then push and pull the door gently while it's locked. It shouldn't flex. A door that moves in its frame under hand pressure is either misaligned or has a failing gearbox.

Brands to look for if you need to replace the gearbox: GU, Fuhr, Maco, Roto, Mila, and Winkhaus all make common multipoint gearboxes. Most cost £35 to £80 for the part. If you're not confident pulling the door apart, leave it for a locksmith, but do the test now so you know what you're dealing with.

While you're at the front door, check the keep, the metal plate the bolts fire into in the frame. Is it substantial? Is it screwed in with long screws that reach the stud behind the frame, or short screws barely gripping MDF? Short screws in a soft frame mean the whole thing can be kicked in regardless of what cylinder you've got. Replace with 75 to 100mm screws while you're there.

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Back Door and Any Secondary External Doors

Front door sorted, go straight to the back.

Older properties in Gossops Green, Bewbush, and Northgate often still have timber back doors with a single BS3621 deadlock and maybe a nightlatch. Those locks may be fine, but the same key-copy problem applies. If the cylinder is the same euro format, replace it. If it's a traditional oval cylinder or rim cylinder, you can often re-key rather than replace, though a locksmith needs to do that.

Flat profile timber doors with mortice locks: check the BS standard. A 5-lever mortice deadlock to BS3621 is solid. A 2-lever lock is not. You can usually see the lever count printed on the lock forend, the strip of metal visible on the door edge when the door's open.

Patio doors are a separate problem. Most older patio doors rely on the cylinder in the handle, which is often a basic profile cylinder, plus an internal bolt or snib. The anti-lift pins matter too, those vertical bolts that drop into the frame to stop the door being lifted off the track. If yours don't have them, they're worth fitting. Also check whether the glass is double-glazed and laminated, because a single-glazed patio door in 2025 is just a large window with drama.

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The Garage

This is the one people forget, and it's probably the biggest oversight on the average moving day.

If the property has an integral garage, meaning a garage with a door directly into the house, that internal door is an entry point. Attackers know this. A garage door, whether it's an up-and-over or a sectional roller, is usually far easier to get through than a front door. If an attacker can get into the garage, that internal door becomes the real target, and those internal doors are very often hollow-core fire doors with a basic handle lock. Not ideal.

Check these three things:

• The internal garage-to-house door: it should be a solid core door and should have a proper deadlock, ideally to BS3621 or BS8621. If it's hollow, that's a priority upgrade.
• The garage door mechanism: does the electric opener have rolling code technology? Older openers from the early 2000s used fixed codes that can be cloned with a £20 device. If the opener has no branding or looks ancient, ask the vendor for the manual, or look up the model.
• Is there a manual lock on the garage door itself, separate from the electric mechanism? Power cut, or someone who knows how to trip the release cord, and the motor alone isn't holding anything shut.

For detached garages, the same logic applies but the immediate risk is slightly lower since there's no connecting door to the house. Still worth checking the padlock hasp if that's what's securing it. A surface-mounted hasp screwed into wood is almost useless. A close-shackle padlock through a steel-reinforced hasp is a different conversation.

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Side Gates

Side gates get ignored at every stage of the homebuying process, and they do a job. A closed side gate is not just a boundary. It pushes someone from a public-facing action (walking down the side of the house) into a more deliberate and visible one (climbing over it). That friction matters.

Check:

• Does the gate latch actually hold, or does it just sit closed? Rattling latches on timber gates in RH10 and RH11 properties are extremely common. Timber swells and shrinks, latches drift out of alignment.
• Is there a lock, or just a bolt? A bolt you can reach over the top to slide is almost useless. You want a lock with a key, or at minimum a bolt that can't be reached from the outside.
• If the gate is solid timber, how solid? Timber gates rot at the posts. Check the post bases. A gate that looks fine can be pushed over with one shove if the post is rotten at ground level.

A £25 close-shackle padlock and hasp properly mounted, with hardwood blocking behind the fixing points, does a reasonable job. For timber gates where the post alignment is off, a locksmith or a decent joiner is worth twenty minutes of their time to get it right.

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Window Locks

Windows are the secondary entry point burglars move to if doors look too hard. Ground floor and accessible first-floor windows, anything reachable from a flat roof, outbuilding, or the top of a gate, are the ones that need checking today.

For uPVC windows, the handle mechanism usually incorporates a basic espagnolette locking bar. Turning the handle to the locked position is the basic function, but check that the actual window lock key, the separate key that locks the handle in position, works and has a key that comes with the property. Many don't. The vendor has often lost the window keys years ago. A locksmith can often re-key window locks or supply replacements, but if you've moved in and those handles spin freely with nothing locking them, add a surface-mounted window stop or sash stop as a temporary fix. About £5 each from any hardware shop.

For sash windows, the cam locks on older sashes can be defeated by anyone with a credit card and a few seconds. Sash stops and dual screws are the upgrade.

Also check: are any ground-floor windows single-glazed? If so, does that glass have any laminate layer? A laminated glass sticker is a bigger deterrent than the lock itself because getting in quietly becomes genuinely difficult.

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The Key Safe Question

If you're a landlord in Crawley handing over a property, or moving a family member into a new place, you might be tempted to fit a key safe on moving day for convenience. A quick word on this: the grade of key safe matters enormously, and a £15 wall-mounted key safe is not a security device, it's an advert that there's a key on the wall. The Supra C500 series and the Master Lock 5401D both have Sold Secure Diamond ratings and are a different product entirely from the cheap ones. The difference between those two categories is covered separately in another post on this site, but don't fit anything unrated on day one and assume you've added security.

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Smart Doorbells and Cameras

Not strictly a lock job, but you've got an hour and this takes five minutes.

If the previous owner had a smart doorbell, a Ring or Nest or similar, and it's still on the wall, it's probably still connected to their account. Remove it, factory reset it, and set it up from scratch. The previous owner can see footage from outside your new front door until you do this. That's a weird situation at best.

Check any indoor cameras or external cameras the same way. A camera with someone else's credentials is not working for you.

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One Final Walk-Round Before You Accept the Van

With the removal van arriving and boxes about to fill every room, do this walk-round now rather than in six weeks when you've forgotten the layout:

• Try every external door from the outside with the new keys. Make sure they work.
• Try locking every window in its locked position. Note which ones don't have keys.
• Locate the electricity consumer unit and the alarm panel if there is one. Get the alarm code from the vendor if you haven't already. If you can't get the code, a locksmith or alarm engineer can reset most panels.
• Find where any hidden key boxes are in the garden, because vendors often forget to mention them and an attacker would love to find one before you do.
• Check the shed if there is one. Is there a petrol lawn mower or power tools? These are taken in burglaries constantly. A shed padlock that's actually rated is worth fitting today.

If there's one job from this list you're not comfortable doing yourself, it's the front door cylinder. Everything else on this list is either a ten-minute hardware shop job or a visual check. The cylinder replacement is also quick, but if you measure wrong and order the wrong size, you've lost a day. Most locksmiths in Crawley carry a range of TS007 cylinders and can change one while the van's being unloaded.

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Rapid Response covers Crawley and across the RH10, RH11, RH12, and nearby RH1, RH6, RH13 postcodes. On a moving day job we'll tell you what you've got, what it's worth keeping, and what genuinely needs changing, without overselling it. Arrival's usually under thirty minutes. Pricing is quoted on the call before we come out.