The first instinct after a break in is to clean up. Close the drawers, sweep the glass, put the room back the way it was, because the mess is the part that makes it feel violating.
Do not do that yet.
Almost everything that goes wrong after a burglary comes from decisions made in the first few hours, when nobody is thinking clearly. Here is a plain order to work through.
Before you go inside
If you arrive home and the door is open or a window is smashed, do not walk in.
Most burglars are long gone. Some are not. Stand outside, ring 000 if you think anyone is still in the house, and wait.
If it is clearly historic and the house is empty, you can go in, but go in aware that you are walking through a scene you will need to describe accurately later.
Do not tidy, do not touch
Police may want to attend and take prints, particularly from the entry point, and particularly if there have been other break ins nearby.
That means leaving the glass, the jemmied window frame, the drawers and the discarded items where they are. It also means not handling anything the offender likely touched. The classic mistake is picking up the emptied jewellery box to see what is left in it.
Ring the police first and ask whether they are attending and how long it will be. If they are not coming out, they will tell you, and you can start cleaning after you have photographed everything.
Get the report number and write it down properly
You will need this for your insurer. Not the officer’s name, the actual report or event number.
Also note the date and time you found it, the date and time you last knew the house was secure, and how the offender got in. Insurers ask all three, and answering “sometime last week, I think” makes a claim harder than it needs to be.
Photograph before you do anything else
Take far more photos than you think you need.
Wide shots of each room from the doorway. The point of entry from outside and inside. Damage to doors, frames, windows, locks and screens. Empty spaces where things used to be. Any tool marks.
These photos take five minutes and they carry the whole insurance claim. Once you clean up, they are gone.
Build the list while your memory is fresh
Sit down that night with a coffee and go room by room writing down what is missing. Not later in the week. That night.
For each item try to record the make, model, rough age, what you paid and where you bought it. Old receipts, credit card statements, warranty emails and the box in the garage are all useful.
Serial numbers matter more than anything. Laptops, phones, cameras, power tools and bikes all have them, and police can only match recovered property to you if there is a serial or a distinctive mark. If you have a photo of the item, even a background shot from a family photo, keep it.
Bikes are worth a special mention. If yours was stolen, the frame number is on the underside of the bottom bracket, and if you have never recorded it, check any service invoice from a bike shop.
Ring the insurer early, even if you are undecided
You can lodge a claim and withdraw it. You cannot always lodge one late.
Most home and contents policies have a notification period, and some have specific requirements about reporting to police first. Ring them within a day. Ask what evidence they want, whether they will send an assessor, and whether emergency repairs are covered before assessment.
Ask that last question explicitly. If a window has to be boarded up tonight, you want to know whether that cost is claimable and whether you need a particular trade to do it.
Secure the house before dark
Boarding, a temporary lock, a screen refitted. Whatever the entry point was, close it today.
Then change the locks. Not because the offender took your keys, though check whether they did, but because you cannot be certain what was copied or taken from a bag, and the peace of mind is worth more than the locksmith fee.
Change the garage remote code if it is one of the older fixed code units. Change the alarm code. If a spare key was in the fake rock by the door, it is not there any more.
The digital part people forget
If a laptop, phone or tablet was taken, you have a second problem that is not about the hardware.
Use another device to sign out of your accounts everywhere. Email first, because email is the master key to everything else. Then banking, then anything with a saved card.
Change your email password and turn on two factor authentication if it was not already on. Use the find my device feature to mark the item as lost and wipe it if you can.
If any password was written down and taken, change it. If the same password was used on other sites, change those too.
Also think about what was on the device. Photos of documents, a scanned passport, a spreadsheet with account numbers. If something sensitive was on there, act on it now rather than waiting to see what happens.
Check the whole property, not just the room that looks wrong
People fixate on the ransacked bedroom and miss the shed.
Walk the entire block. Garage, shed, side gate, under the house, the car if it was parked in the driveway. Tools go missing more often than televisions, and they are often the more expensive loss.
Check whether anything was left behind. Offenders sometimes stage items near a door intending a second trip and get interrupted.
Tell the neighbours
Not for sympathy. For information.
Someone in your street has a doorbell camera pointed at the footpath. Ask around within the first day, because most of those devices only keep a week or two of footage and some keep less.
Local community groups are also worth a post. Break ins cluster, and a neighbour who was hit two nights earlier may have footage or a description.
Then, and only then, think about prevention
Give it a few days. Decisions made the night of a break in tend to be expensive and not especially effective.
When you do get to it, the order that helps most is boring. Better locks and deadlocks on the actual entry points. Sensor lighting where the offender came in. Trimming the shrub that hid them from the street. Then cameras.
Cameras are worth having, but only if they do the job you need. A camera that produces a grainy shape at ten metres is not evidence, and a system nobody can log into after the installer leaves is not much use either. Before you spend, it pays to know what to ask before you book anything, because the difference between a system that identifies a face and one that just tells you something happened comes down to camera placement, lens choice and lighting, not the number on the box.
Get quotes when you are calm. Ask what the footage actually looks like at night, at the distance you care about. Ask where the recorder lives and how long it keeps video.
The bit nobody tells you
The stuff is replaceable and the feeling takes longer. Plenty of people sleep badly for a few weeks afterwards and feel silly about it.
You are not being dramatic. Someone was in your house. Give it time, get the locks changed early because that helps more than anything, and if it is still sitting heavily after a month, talk to someone about it.