 What the heck is the best way to protect your tools in your workshop? Well, I would work here at Paul Carson here, a small workshop guy. Well, something happened to me that I hope never happens to you. I came downstairs this morning to get a little work done in my garage, and let me show you what I saw when I opened up my side garage door. Here's my garage door. It's got a nice covering on it so nobody can see in. But I think I screwed up last night because I don't see any break and entry. But what I do see is a lot of blank spaces on my wall. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Well, it turns out what I told you was actually just a recreation of a nightmare that I had. And I really did not get out of all of my toys, and I did not have my garage burned down. But what if I did? What if somebody came in here, they're desperate for drugs, and they know enough about woodworking to just spot all the really good things that are small and can be carried, and they just make several trips to their truck, and then they take off while I'm busy sleeping upstairs. What if my whole place burns down? Have I done the right things to protect myself? You know, I don't know how much I have in here. I'm lucky in life because of my financial situation. So I bought a lot of very expensive toys. So the real question is how about insurance? Surely your homeowner's insurance will cover your workshop. Well, I would say that that's probably true if you're a hobbyist, and if you don't have very much in the way of tools. Or even if you're doing a little bit of business and you have less than $1,500 worth of tools that you use for that business. What I'm trying to say is if it's property, personal property for hobbies, you've got to have some coverage under your homeowners if you can prove what all you bought. So I would recommend you take videos of everything in your workshop. But if you're trying to transition to doing woodworking as a profession, or you're already doing that, you're doing projects for people and selling them to them, you're selling something on Etsy, you're doing any number of things, you've got a YouTube channel where you're trying to make money. So if you're running your business out of your garage at home, you have a nasty surprise coming, I believe, at least based on my call to my insurance agent today. I called my insurance agent a couple of months ago and actually it was just a person who works in that office, not the real licensed agent, otherwise I might have got a different answer. But I said, hey, I'm doing the woodworking as a hobby. I'm starting to get some tools of some value at my workshop. Is it covered under my homeowners? And the answer I got was, yes it is, don't worry. Well, I tend to worry. So then I started thinking, well, what if I'm trying to do a business? When my garage burns down and I go to State Farm or any insurance company and I say, hey, I've got $35,000 worth of stuff I was using in there, if they determine it was business related, I'm going to be SOL, if you know what that means. So anyway, you need to look at your situation. Are you purely a hobbyist? If so, call your insurance agent and tell them how much equipment you have to make sure you're covered and see what it might cost you to cover a little bit more by paying some extra premium. But be sure you disclose whether or not you're doing some of this for a business because I think the coverage of business assets that are at your home is like limited to $1,500. Well, there is a solution. You can get a separate, what's called inland marine policy, I think. It's a policy designed to cover tools and business equipment, business equipment. It's expensive. I've got a quote. I'm thinking about it, you know, with maybe $1,000 or $2,000 deductible and then $30,000 of coverage. I'm looking at close to $700 a year. So it's not inexpensive if you've got a lot of stuff to really cover it. Yes, I have an option at my age to say, well, that's karma. If my tools are all gone, maybe it's time to put aside that hobby and go on to something else, go on to your next adventure. But a lot of you are probably doing it to move toward doing it as a profession or just to really, really, really have a great workshop whether you sell stuff or not. Here's the steps I think you ought to take. Number one, deal with the insurance. Make a decision there but make an informed decision. Find out if you're covered or not and then decide whether or not you can sleep at night if you're not. So after you've taken care of the insurance, which is the only real solution to getting your tools back is to have the insurance company buy some new ones for you. But some things that try to mitigate the issue, even with or without the insurance is a little motion detector. I think this is under $30 or something. I bought this off of Amazon. I'll put the link below. It's a little alarm thing to go off with the alarm and a little motion detector. So I put the motion detector on a shelf in my garage so when somebody walks in and starts walking around they'll trip the motion. And then in my house right by the front door I set the alarm. I just arm it at night and then I unarm it before I come out. Well, most of the time I unarm it. A lot of times my wife has to unarm it for me after it goes off in the house. Let's see what happens when the thief comes into my garage. Now actually I've decided that I'm just going to go ahead and duplicate this because my concern is that even though the alarm is going off in the house that there's nothing to scare the thief, the burglar or whatever. I would rather have them when they just come into my garage and start walking around for another one of these to go off inside of here really loud and maybe that will be enough for them to panic and get the heck out of my garage. I don't know. But anyway, this is certainly a solution that you can get one or two of these sets depending on how your garage is set up. The other thing you can do, although again I think all it does is capture the video footage and then you can see who's using your stuff, is this is a little camera from Blink. Blink is actually an Amazon company. You buy a controller. It's kind of a Wi-Fi. It connects to Wi-Fi. And you buy that controller and then it connects to whatever cameras you get. I think you can get up to four. So I've got one here. I've got one on the other wall pointing this way so I can try to get the person's view. You know, the smart burglar is going to have stuff to disguise themselves. And then I've got one outside in a little bird house pointing right at my garage door and then I've got one in the driveway. So maybe I could catch them coming up the driveway. But again, you know, it makes me feel good that I can pick up my phone in the house and look at my cameras and see if anything's going on. And so if my alarm goes off, I'm going to check my cameras and I'm going to call the police. I'm probably not going to come out at my age and take on the burglar with a bat. That's the solution. I'll put the links to the blink cameras and the controller down below as well. And the other thing that I would do is if you have a door that they can look in with a glass panel in it, then put a cover over that glass. You can buy at Home Depot or other places, just little kind of rolling foggy cover and just cut it out to fit the glass so that they can't shine a flashlight in there and see what you've got and say, oh my God, I've hit the treasure trove. So anyway, give some thought to how to protect your tools with insurance and or with some security devices or both. And like I always say, you can't stop the waves, in this case the thieves, but you can learn to serve. In this case, have insurance. And without that, signing off.