After careful consideration I am ready to talk about what happened.
I’m going to go in chronological order… we finally figured out the sequence of events after a lot of detective work.
On Thursday night, someone entered the property. We have an exterior closet on the small deck off the bedroom. They squeezed around the scaffolding and entered the exterior closet - which had a regular door knob, not locked. They then crawled into house under the new main staircase. Most of these walls have shear plywood and they all have insulation between the studs.
Don’t ask me how… but they pulled off the one strip of insulation that was against the eastern kitchen wall with only drywall. They kicked a big hole in the drywall and entered the house. They went into the hall bathtub area and took off THREE (just three) pieces of the newly laid subway tile. Then they went down into the garage, passing $$$$$ tools and materials everywhere. Did not touch anything else except an odd cut of one dumbwaiter wire.
In the garage (which does not have any lighting installed yet) they found some type of screw or something and gouged a giant X in each of the newly painted doors that were lined up in our paint factory. Did not touch anything else. Walked by gallons of paint and other stuff that they could have used to vandalize all over the place. It’s kind of like they ‘keyed’ the doors.
Only about 5 of the newly painted doors were in the garage. We had moved most of them into the basement for safe keeping, just to make sure no one banged against them or something. Our basement is our ‘secure’ area with a deadbolt on an access door.
Evidently this person then opened the garage western exterior door and walked around outside of the basement. Do not ask me how they could possibly see into the dark basement area and notice more doors in there. They picked up a piece of lumber and smashed one of the basement windows and crawled in through all the glass. All this… to gouge an X into every single painted door in the basement. Walked by many expensive things. Not even a screw driver is missing.
Needless to say, this was extremely scary to me because it was like I was personally being targeted by a looney or something. Someone went to all this trouble to solely damage the painted doors, nothing else. First thoughts were the crazy stalker guy from about 4 years ago who still lives about 5 blocks from this project. But, he would not bash in a window and risk getting caught by the police.
We have pieced together what we believe happened… it involves a dispute between the painter workers and their boss. Needless to say, none of those painters will ever be anywhere near the place again.
We have every possible security you can imagine now… including motion detector lights everywhere surrounding the house. I’m not going to talk about the remainder of the security system details. I did not want to discuss this just yet until I had a long talk with my agent about everything.
What is this going to cost? We have 3 types of doors; the original wood doors; original Anderson patio door and the new composite custom doors. We have sanded down 1 of each type, applying bondo and then we will see if they can be repaired and painted back to brand new. My suspicion is that the composite doors are going to be the problem. Worse case, another $1,200 for new interior doors. And about 3 man days to get them patched and repainted because we have 22 doors to fix.