If junkshops are genuinely on the up and up, they could practice self-policing by asking all junk and scrap sellers to register their sales in a logbook by providing proper identification, addresses and listing the items sold.

That would discourage thieves from disposing their loot in junkshops and take away the 'easy cash' part of the racket. One of the nicer things I have salvaged from my old house during its renovation were jalousie windows.

I know, those two words: jalousies and nice, are rarely found together in the same sentence with out eyebrows being involuntarily raised but the this was one advantage of renovating a 50-year-old house… 50-year old stuff. These are normally ordinary stuff by today's standards, but because they have been built so long ago, they have become extraordinary. In my case, one of those special finds were the old jalousie windows.

Unlike today's el cheapo, window-ng-bayan aluminum jalousies, those that were plucked from my home during the renovation were made of steel. What's the difference? Anybody who has seen and felt today's jalousies, made of paper-thin aluminum, can attest to the inferior build quality.

The aluminum that holds the glass in place can be bent as easily as Play Dough. In comparison, bending those same parts of the steel jalousies I recovered required the use of tools. They also came with built in grills, made of solid steel bars. After the first few sets were cleaned, painted, and reinstalled, they actually looked classy. Nowhere near modern mass-produced jalousies that can usually be described in two words… flimsy and tacky.

Anyway, just the other day, the few sets of those steel jalousie window frames lying around the backyard, waiting to be cleaned, painted, and reinstalled were stolen. In the dead of the night, someone pried open a small opening, just enough for a kid to fit, in the small gate at the side of my house. They then proceeded to make away with my 50-year-old jalousie window frames that had been left leaning against the wall while being cleaned.

The actual value of the items that were stolen is minimal. They would most likely be sold by the kilo as scrap metal. What hurt was nobody makes the junk that they stole anymore. But since we are nearing the end of the renovation and are already scraping the bottom of the financial barrel, losing the recycled, free but nice windows, means that we will most likely be forced to settle with new jalousies that look and feel nowhere near the units we lost.

There is also the awful feeling of being violated. Even if they were not able to not enter the inside of my home, seeing the tiny hole they forced open to allow a little kid to enter my property and steal my stuff makes me want to run 50,000 volts through my fence, line my perimeter with some claymore mines, get a .50-caliber machine gun, and a killer guard dog who I will name Tiny.

After we discovered the theft, our first instinct was to do quick investigating by scouring the junk shops in the area, the most likely place for stolen scrap metal to end up. Unfortunately for us, they didn't turn up yet. Again I was reminded by the popular wildlife conservation slogan: "When the buying stops, the killing can, too". This is where junkshops get my ire. If the people running junkshops took a little more care before buying all the stuff being brought to them, these "scrap" robberies wouldn't become so damn popular. After all, these robberies wouldn't be happening if nobody were buying the hot goods.

These thieves are using kids, essentially destroying these young lives before they have even begun, just to get into their targets. Whole communities have lost electricity when they steal electric lines, and the streets of our cities have gone dark, instantly becoming accident and petty theft prone because of this sort of thievery. I am sure people have been hurt or even been killed because of this racket and yet it doesn't seem that our local governments and the police are breathing down the necks of junkshops just yet. If junkshops are genuinely on the up and up, they could practice self-policing by asking all junk and scrap sellers to register their sales in a logbook by providing proper identification, addresses and listing the items sold. That would discourage thieves from disposing their loot in junkshops and take away the "easy cash" part of the racket.

Since the relationship between petty thieves and junk shops doesn't look like it will change in the near future, and uprooting my entire home and moving to a walled subdivision is not a viable option, all I can do as the man of the house is to prepare for the worst.

As soon as the renovation work is done, everything that can be considered as junk will be sorted, the totally useless ones thrown away and those that can still be used kept in a bodega. Preparing for the worst will also probably mean arming myself just in case those thieves think that there is better "junk" inside my home.

A machine gun nest in the middle of my dining room might be a bad idea, so a 9mm will probably do. This has been a purchase I have been putting off for years, but after this dose of reality Philippine style, its better to have one just in case.