The Easy and Inexpensive Way To Reinforce Your Front Door—and Why You Should

While we're used to going on TikTok to find a little fun and the latest food crazes (still loving baked oats and honeycomb pasta), we weren't expecting to find a security hack. Yet during our most recent scroll through the app, a video caught our attention with just a few words: "If your home has a door, you should do this…" Since, like most people, our home has a door, we stopped to watch.

In the quick video created by TikTok user Cathy Pedrayes, she suggests reinforcing your door with one small, cheap, easy-to-install change. "Take out the screws in the strike plate of an exterior door and replace them with screws that are 2.5- to 3-inches long," Pedrayes suggests in the video. "This will reinforce your door, making it harder to kick down."

While it's hard to imagine someone kicking down your front door, better safe than extremely sorry, right? Especially since, as Pedrayes notes in the video, this is an easy and cheap security measure, even if you rarely pick up a drill or a screwdriver.

Basically, she recommends swapping out the short screws holding the strike plate (that's the part of the lock that's on the door frame, not the door) with longer screws. Those longer screws penetrate deeper into the frame, making it that much more difficult for someone try and break open your door. Extra security with just three or four extra screws sounds pretty good.

Plus, as Hunker points out, this simple hack is cost-effective since you can pick up a pound of three-inch screws at Home Depot for less than $10, which should be more than enough screws to reinforce the front, back, and side doors of your home.