Guard Your Garage Goods: How to Secure and Insure Your Outbuildings

• Featured Articles
• Published: 08 Sep 2008 in Household and Home Insurance

We’re all familiar with warnings to safeguard our homes against burglaries, but it’s easy to forget about the security of our outside buildings. As items stored in your garage and humble garden shed can be worth thousands of pounds, you need to keep them under lock and key, and adequately protected under your contents insurance.

Outbuildings can contain a lot more than a rusting trowel or a couple of half-empty tins of paint. Apart from expensive power-tools, they often hold sports equipment from bikes to canoes, patio furniture, children’s toys and barbecues; so the total of value of outbuilding contents can run well into the thousands.

As prevention is better than cure, to help avoid a shed or garage burglary, follow our security tips.

Outbuilding security tips

• Make sure that the doors of outside buildings are adequately secured with a lock that can’t be broken easily: a rusty padlock is not usually sufficient to keep burglars out.
• Also pay attention to door hinges; if the hinges can be easily screwed off, you’ll have wasted your money on an expensive door lock.
• At least one screw needs to be replaced by 5mm bolts and nuts that cannot be removed from the outside.
• Extra locks on drawers and cupboards inside garages will put off thieves who want to access the equipment inside them.
• Ensure that outbuilding windows are secured. Obscured glass is also useful as it means that passing burglars are not tempted by the goodies on display.
• Sheds need to be properly anchored to the ground so they can’t simply be lifted away by thieves.
• Adding security flood-lighting and an alarm to your outbuilding is a good idea if you have particularly high-value items to protect.
• And finally, don’t leave pricey garden equipment, such as lawn movers, lying around outside overnight. Your outbuilding might be as inaccessible as Fort Knox, but all the security in the world will be useless if you don’t remember to put your expensive stuff away!

Contents insurance for outbuildings

If prevention is increased security, then the cure could be home insurance that extends to protect your outbuildings. Figures for 2007 show that the average claim for items in outbuildings was £587.94*. And if you thought that was high, the most expensive home insurance claim made after an outbuilding burglary was over £30,000!

So, if your home contents insurance does not already cover the contents of your shed or garage (check the policy details to find out), and you can’t afford to replace stolen or damaged goods, it’s a good idea to extend it.

Items in outbuildings worth more than about £1,000 should be individually listed on contents insurance policies. It’s also a good idea to take photos of expensive goods, as this can often speed up the payment of a home insurance claim – and not just for the stuff in your shed, but also for the rest of your house.

So if you’ve got something in an outbuilding that’s worth looking after, you may need to invest in a few extra security measures and some additional contents insurance. Protect your shed; don’t let your outbuilding be an easy target for thieves.

 

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*Data for those who took out insurance through Confused.com, and sourced from 705,882 quotes run in the UK between January and December 2007.