There is nothing more chilling than thinking that there might be an intruder in your home except if you think they might also mean to do you or your family harm.

Here are some general tips on clearing a home or building that will keep you safe (or at least relatively safe).

First Rule of Clearing a House: Only Clear Your House By Yourself as a Last Resort
In law enforcement and the military, clearing a building is done in teams of two or more because it’s safer and more effective. That extra set of eyes allows you to have a 360-degree view.

If you’re clearing your home, it’s probably just you. Because you don’t have eyes in the back of your head, your field of vision is limited, leaving you vulnerable to attacks in your blind spots.

Bottom line: clearing your home by yourself is a dangerous task. Only do it if you absolutely must!

Set Up Your Home for Successful Clearing

Clearing a building is dangerous because you can’t see through doors and walls or around corners. Consequently, several tactics must be used to allow you to navigate a house while reducing (but not eliminating) your chances of being blindsided by an attack. We’ll discuss those here in a bit.

First, install security cameras throughout your home. This will allow you to see where the possible threat is without having to expose yourself physically. Nest Cam and Ring make affordable wireless cameras that connect to your smartphone.

After you’ve installed these cameras, think about how you can decorate your home so that your ability to see around corners is enhanced. Place mirrors and reflective framed pictures in strategic locations so that you can see into a hallway or another room from a distant and concealed location. Motion activated lights are also an excellent addition to place the advantage in your court.

Home Clearing Tactics

Choose Your Pace: Slow or Hasty

If your loved ones aren’t in immediate danger, take things slow. It’s safer for you and allows you to be more deliberate when searching your home for intruders.

If you believe your loved ones are in immediate danger, do a hasty search. Even as you speed up the pace, however, you still want to practice good clearing tactics to keep yourself safe.

How to Hold Your Pistol When Clearing Your Home

If you’re clearing your house with a pistol, hold your firearm in a high ready position. This position allows you to maneuver throughout your home quickly and with a reduced profile while simultaneously staying ready to fire when needed.

Constantly Check Your Six

As you’re clearing your home, it can be easy to get “target lock.” You become so focused on clearing a corner or a doorway that you become unaware of what’s going on behind or to the side of you. As you clear different obstacles in your home, keep your head on a swivel. Don’t become so focused on one area that you become blind to everything else.

The Master Tactic of Clearing Your Home: Slicing the Pie

When you’re clearing a building, you have two contradictory goals: 1) find and eliminate the threat, and 2) keep yourself concealed from the threat. If you go bulldozing towards an intruder, you leave yourself open to attack. If you completely conceal yourself from your potential attacker, however, it becomes hard for you to spot and possibly neutralize him because doors, corners, and objects are in your way.

To navigate between this strategic Scylla and Charybdis, we’re going to use a building-clearing tactic called “slicing the pie.” Slicing the pie is also known as “threshold evaluation” or “angled clearing.”

Slicing the pie allows us to slowly increase our field of vision around corners, through doorways, and up and down stairs, all while keeping a reduced profile. When you slice the pie, you use an angle to keep yourself concealed and slowly step away from the apex of that angle to gradually reveal a new “slice” of the room. When a new slice of the room is revealed, quickly scan it from top to bottom for your threat or evidence of your threat. Once you’ve noted that it’s clear, reveal another small slice of the room and scan again.

How to Clear Corners

Corners are the most common objects in your house, and you don’t want to barge right around them because you might run right into your armed intruder. To traverse a corner safely, we’re going to slowly increase our field of vision around it while minimizing our profile by slicing the pie.

Start off by getting as close to the wall as you can without scraping up against it (you don’t want to make a lot of noise and give your position away).

Slowly approach the corner and stop about 3 or 4 feet away from it. Your pivot point will be the apex of the corner. Begin slicing the pie by taking one sidestep away from the wall. Make sure you’re in that high ready position. You don’t want your pistol or elbows poking out. Scan up and down the slice of the room revealed to you. Once you’ve cleared that slice, take another sidestep away from the wall. You should be making a semi-circle around your pivot point, until you’re parallel with the corner.

How to Clear Doors

First, you want to stay out of the fatal funnel even if the door is closed. Last time I checked, bullets can go through wooden doors. Stand to the side against the walls.

Check to see if the door opens in or out. You don’t want to waste time trying to push the door open when it actually pulls out. You can tell if a door opens in or out by checking the hinges. If you can see the hinge, the door is going to open towards you.

When you approach a closed door, do so from the side the handle is on. Keeping your pistol in the high ready position, put your non-dominant hand on the doorknob, turn it quickly, and swing open the door. Make sure you keep the muzzle slightly high, so you don’t point it at your hand while grabbing the knob.

When you open a door, simultaneously push the door open and step back. This is called “ghosting a door” because it looks like a ghost opened the door.

While you open the door, simultaneously step back. This provides some distance so you can safely slice the pie, and is called “ghosting a door” because, from the perspective of the intruder, it looks like a ghost opened it.

Now we’re going to slice the pie. This time your pivot point will be right dab in the middle of the doorway. Sidestep in a semicircular path around the pivot point until you get to the other side of the doorframe.

Being able to clear a home of potential intruders is a survival skill that everyone should at least have a passing familiarity with.

The key is to make sure that your clearing process is slow, deliberate and thorough.

To get more tips on clearing a building or home, check out The Art of Manliness.

Featured Image via The Art of Manliness