Twenty-eight years of reading houses the morning after — written down as quiet checks for women and people who live alone. Almost none of it costs money. Almost all of it is habit.
“It almost never starts with a gadget. It starts with a habit you skipped on an ordinary Tuesday.” — Ellen Briggs
Not with a crowbar first. With a glance: Is anybody paying attention? Does this place look empty on purpose? Does it look like one person’s rhythm, easy to learn? I am not selling you an alarm. I am asking you to notice what your house already says.
A house that runs like a clock — same dark rooms, same porch pile, same still drive — teaches a stranger your week without asking.
Side yards, sliders, basement doors, and “just to the mailbox” unlocked moments. Quiet edges are where solo houses leak.
Locks slow a problem down. A neighbor who knows your first name, and would notice dark lights too long, changes the whole picture.
No email required, no form, no download. This is one full check from the book, printed here on purpose. Do it tonight and you will know whether the rest is worth your money.
Everything in this checklist rests on one quiet idea: your house should not hand a stranger an invitation. A spare key under a mat, rock, flowerpot, or “clever” magnetic box is not a secret. It is a shared rumor on a lot of blocks — and on a solo house, it is often the first soft target.
The part people skip. Hiding a key is not the same as having a plan. A plan is a person. If the key lives outside, anyone who has watched your porch for a week has a theory about where.
Go and look — two minutes, in daylight:
The fix, tonight, for free. Move the spare to a person, not a place. Tell them where it is for, and what “worried” looks like if they ever need to use it. If you rent and cannot change hardware, this still works — habits and people do not need a landlord’s permission.
Not that cameras and alarms are useless. That almost everybody buys them first — and buys them instead of the quiet things underneath.
A camera pointed at a door you still leave unlocked “just for a minute” is a recording of a habit you already knew. Lock every exit when you leave — even the mailbox walk — before you shop for gear.
Footage helps after. A neighbor who would notice dark lights for two days helps during. One hello and one phone number outranks another app login you will ignore.
A monitoring contract runs for years. Flattening the TV box, fixing the porch bulb, and closing the garage gap cost almost nothing and change what the curb says tonight.
Not three volumes. Not an upsell ladder. One practical checklist you mark with a pen — doors, curb, packages, vacation, and who notices if you go quiet.
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Mark what is true today. One finished FIX beats ten notes you never touch.
Doors talk. Soft habits keep them from talking too much.
Stand across the street. A stranger only needs a few seconds.
Ordinary patterns protect better than dramatic ones.
Absence is readable. Make it quieter.
Solo does not mean invisible. It means intentional about who watches with you.
Walk the free check. Open the PDF. Mark a few lines with a pen. If it hasn’t changed a single useful thing about how you look at your house, ask for a refund inside thirty days — full amount, no speech required.
Refunds and questions go through your Gumroad receipt. Reply to it, or use the contact link on the order page. That reaches the seller directly. Keep whatever notes you already wrote either way — if you moved a spare key and got one neighbor’s number into your phone, this was already worth doing.
Without a checklist: you buy the camera, you pay the monthly bill, and the part that actually decides it — the door, the spare key, the porch bulb, the neighbor — never gets touched. That is the ordinary way this goes.
With it: you work through ~90 checks in the order I’d do them. The first ones are free and take a few minutes tonight.
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No. There is nothing in this checklist about weapons, force, or what you may do to defend yourself — not what you may own, not when, not how. Those rules differ by place more sharply than anything else here, and a confident answer from a stranger in a PDF could make your life worse. If you want to know your position, ask a lawyer licensed where you live — before anything happens.
Most of it, yes. The great majority of the ninety checks are habits, words, objects you move, and things you look at — none of which need a landlord’s permission. Where a check involves changing hardware, it says so, and it says to ask. Section 5 in particular was written with renters and people living alone in mind.
No, and that is deliberate. What you may install, what you may change in a rented home, detector rules, HOA limits — all of it varies. Where a check runs into one of those lines, the PDF says so and points you toward who actually knows: landlord, fire department, tenants’ service, or a lawyer in your state. This is education, not legal advice.
PDF. Instant download after you pay on Gumroad. Yours to keep and to print. Nothing to renew, no subscription, no app login. Mark it on paper if you like — that is how it was meant to be used.
The free sample above is the honest test — go look for a spare key hide the way a stranger would. If there isn’t one, you are ahead of most people, and the curb and “who notices” sections will still probably find you two or three quiet gaps. If there is one, you already have your answer.
Through Gumroad, where you bought it. Your receipt has a contact link — that is the same route for a question about a check, a download problem, or a refund inside thirty days. No form to fill in, no need to explain yourself.
A retired Midwest county detective with twenty-eight years on the job. She lives alone. The checklist is written the way she used to brief a partner on a quiet case: what to look at, what it tells you, and what to fix without making a scene. Names and case details are kept out on purpose — this is habits, not war stories.
Retired Midwest county detective. Twenty-eight years of standing in other people’s kitchens, porches, and side yards — noticing what a house said when nobody thought it was saying anything. She lives alone. She prefers habits to gadgets, a pencil to a panic purchase, and a porch conversation to a sales pitch.
The Solo House Checklist is the quiet briefing she wished more people had before the loud shopping started: doors, curb, packages, overnight absence, and who would notice if you went quiet.