Vacation-Proofing Your Home: The 7-Day Pre-Departure Checklist

A house that looks lived in is a house that doesn’t get picked. The objective for vacation prep is straightforward: from the street, from the sidewalk, from anyone scoping the neighborhood for an empty target, your house should look like someone is home.

That’s it. That’s the whole goal. Everything below is in service of it.

The checklist is organized by day so it’s actually doable — most homeowners try to “vacation-proof” the morning of departure and do half the things wrong. Spread across a week, none of it takes more than twenty minutes a day.

Seven Days Out: Schedule and Communicate

1. Tell two people, not the internet. Your trusted next-door neighbor or family member who can keep an eye on things — yes. Your social-media followers — no. Travel posts go up after you’re back. The number of break-ins that involve a target whose Instagram showed them at the airport is non-trivial; don’t be the data point.

2. USPS Hold Mail. Schedule a hold via USPS Hold Mail. Free, takes 60 seconds, can be set 3–30 days in advance. A pile of mail in the box is the single most reliable empty-house signal.

3. Pause newspaper and recurring deliveries. If you still get a paper, pause it. If you have a milk or grocery delivery, pause that too. Anything that arrives on a schedule is a signal.

4. Schedule lawn care or driveway service. If your trip is longer than 7 days in growing season, an unmowed lawn is the second most reliable empty-house signal. Pre-pay your lawn service to come once during your absence; if you mow yourself, ask a neighbor or hire a one-time service.

Six Days Out: Lighting and Presence

5. Set up at least three randomized indoor lights. A single timer on the porch light isn’t enough — it’s so obviously a timer that it can hurt rather than help. Three lights, on different schedules, in rooms you’d actually use, looks like real occupation:

• A living room lamp on from 7–11 PM
• A bedroom light on from 9–10 PM (the “going to sleep” pattern)
• A bathroom light on briefly twice a night

Smart bulbs and smart plugs make this trivial. Buy: Buy on Amazon Schedule via the app, randomize start times by 15 minutes if the app supports it. Total cost: ~$25 for two smart plugs.

6. Test your exterior lighting. Walk the perimeter at night this week. Every motion-light should fire when you walk past. Burned-out bulbs get replaced now, not after you’re back.

Five Days Out: Cars, Cameras, and Sensors

7. Plan the driveway. An empty driveway for two weeks is a tell. Options:

• Leave one car at home and ask a neighbor to move it occasionally.
• Ask a neighbor or family member to park in your driveway a few times.
• Hire a house-sitter who’ll use the driveway naturally.

8. Test every camera and sensor. Open the camera app. Confirm every camera is online and recording. Confirm window sensors and door sensors are armed and reporting. Replace any battery showing under 30%. The last thing you want is to be 1,000 miles away when a sensor goes offline because of a battery that’s been dying for three weeks.

9. Verify the smart-home account is locked down. Two-factor authentication on the camera/alarm account. Strong password (changed in the last year). If a relative needs access while you’re gone, give them their own user account, not your password.

Four Days Out: Doors, Windows, Garage

10. Walk the perimeter and lock every window. Every single window. Including the kitchen window over the sink that nobody ever opens, which is also nobody’s first thought to lock.

11. Engage every secondary lock. Sash pins in the upper track. Sliding-door bars in the floor track. Floor lock on the front door if you have one. (See the window security guide for the secondary-lock setup.) These are most useful when you can’t be there to react.

12. Garage door — check the manual lock. Most garage doors have a manual side-lock that engages a bar through the track. It’s almost never used. Engage it before you leave; it makes the garage door immovable even if someone has the opener code. (More on garage vulnerabilities in the garage security walkthrough.)

13. Garage interior door — confirm it has a deadbolt. If it doesn’t, install one before you leave (10-minute job). The interior door from the garage to the house is your last line of defense if someone gets into the garage.

Three Days Out: Things and Tools Outside

14. Move every potential ladder out of sight. Trash cans, recycling bins, propane tanks, ladders, garden-furniture stackable chairs. Anything tall that someone could move next to a window or a flat-roof line. Inside the garage or behind a locked gate.

15. Move tools out of the yard. Shovel, axe, pruning saw, hedge clippers — all of these are improvised entry tools. Garage or shed; shed gets locked.

16. Hide the spare key, if you’ve got one outside. Better — get rid of it. Give a neighbor a spare instead, or install a smart lock with a temporary code for the trusted person. (See smart locks vs. deadbolts for the right setup.)

Two Days Out: Money, Documents, Valuables

17. Verify the safe is bolted down. A small fireproof safe is only useful if it’s anchored. An unbolted safe walks out the door under someone’s arm and gets opened with a hammer at their leisure later.

18. Move high-value, easily-fenced items. Jewelry, cash, expensive watches — into the safe, or somewhere creative that isn’t the obvious “master bedroom dresser drawer.” A burglar typically spends 8–12 minutes inside a house. They check the obvious spots first.

19. Photograph valuables (if you haven’t recently). This is for insurance, not security. Photos of receipts, serial numbers, and the items themselves saved to cloud storage. Doesn’t help prevent a break-in but makes the recovery dramatically less miserable.

One Day Out: Last Walk

20. Leave a forwarding voicemail/email auto-reply that doesn’t say “I’m out of town.” “I’m not currently checking messages — I’ll respond when I’m back at my desk.” Same effect, no signal value to a stranger who calls or emails the wrong number.

21. Adjust the thermostat — but not too far. Bumping the AC up 7–10°F or the heat down 7–10°F saves real energy on a long trip. Letting the house freeze (in winter) or bake (in summer) damages the house. Smart thermostats handle this naturally; for older units, set conservatively.

22. Walk the 30-minute audit checklist. It catches what you missed. Specifically: any door not double-locked, any window with the latch not seated, anything outside that was supposed to come in.

Departure Day

23. Final lock check. Front door, back door, garage interior door, garage door. All secondary locks engaged.

24. Confirm the alarm is armed. If you have one. “Away” mode, not “stay” mode.

25. Tell your neighbor when you’re leaving and when you’re back. Not the public — your one trusted neighbor. They know what to look for and what’s normal traffic in your driveway (the cleaner, the dog walker) versus what’s not.

26. Photograph the driveway empty. Date-stamped photo on your phone. If you do return to a problem, having a clean baseline of “this is what the house looked like the morning I left” is invaluable to insurance and to police.

While You’re Away

27. Don’t post in real time. Save the photos for after. The house’s emptiness becomes a fact when it goes public.

28. Check the camera app once a day, briefly. Don’t make it your stress-source on vacation. A morning glance is enough.

29. If something looks off, call your neighbor first. Their eyes on the property are faster than 911 from across the country, and 90% of “is that delivery person familiar?” questions get cleared up by a neighbor checking.

Coming Home

30. Don’t do the “back from vacation” social post until the next day. Buys 24 hours of ambiguity for anyone who tracks neighborhood patterns. (This sounds paranoid; it’s actually a free move that costs nothing and reduces a real risk vector.)

31. Walk the perimeter when you get home. Daylight. Same audit walk. Anything obviously moved, broken, or missing — don’t enter the house. Call the police from the driveway.

32. Reset the alarm and lights to normal schedules.

What This Doesn’t Cover

This checklist optimizes for the dominant risk during travel: opportunistic break-ins targeting houses that look empty. It does not address sophisticated targeted threats, stalking situations, or any case where someone specifically knows you’re leaving and is watching for the opportunity. If any of those apply, get a licensed security consultant involved before you go — that’s a different problem and merits a different plan.

For the typical homeowner taking a 5-to-14-day trip, the work above takes a total of 90 minutes spread across a week and removes the visible “no one is home” signal that makes a house an attractive target.

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This post is for educational purposes. It is not professional security advice. Consult a licensed security professional for high-risk or stalking situations.

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