Soon after I rented my first office space in a local industrial compound, the in-house cleaning staff had an accident. One of the janitors that attended to that floor slipped on a wet tile and bumped my door clean off of its rusted hinges.
As soon as I called my landlord, he advised me that it would take two weeks to repair the door. Given that my business office then was pretty much open to anybody, I made a decision to purchase a motion alert alarm to keep intruders away.
I bought a small, passive infrared alarm which was made to monitor entryways and installed it facing the hole where my door used to be. My plan was to utilize it to alert the after-hours security guards to any possible trespassers.
The motion-detecting alarm would sound anytime someone walks by it. And it could even be set up to play a simple two-tone entry chime for when you are at the office and don’t want the alarming to go off and call the guards.
It was battery-powered, so that meant I could mount it in any convenient place around my office doorway. I wouldn’t have worry about getting landlord approval to drill and run wires through the walls.
In the weeks which I had this security alarm, I turned on the two-tone chime while I was in the office so that I would know every time somebody wanted to see me. I then switched it to alarm mode just before I left for the day.
During this period, the security guards actually captured a few people attempting to sneak into my office in the after-hours. These were mainly homeless bums off the street that were trying to steal whatever wasn’t nailed down to sell it off for some quick cash.
It seems silly to have to go 2 weeks without a door but I was able to improvise a clever solution using a motion alert alarm. Instead of throwing the thing away, I plan on keeping it and making use of it later on as part of a complete security system.