Locked Out!

Carrie, Shane and I came home from church today to discover we were locked out of our own house.


Carrie had taken the garage door opener out of the Prius, so it was my job to hop out and type the code in the keypad. It didn't work.

The door had been acting wonky before we left, so I added "fix garage door opener" to my to-do list and shuffled around to the front door. It was best to act quickly before the baby (and thus the wife) started to get impatient. The deadbolt turned without fail. The lock on the handle did fail. My key fit, but the lock did not want to turn.

The frustration started to build. I tried a few more times to make sure I wasn't being an idiot (always a possibility) and then went back to try the garage door code a couple of more times.

No luck.

Shane started to lost his patience. Carrie popped out of the card and asked "What's going on?" Then it was her turn to try the garage door opener.

It didn't work for her either.

She then went to try her key on the front door. There was a chance that I had a bum key for some reason, but the odds were low. If my key was dead, it shouldn't have been able to open the deadbolt.

Carrie's key failed.

Shane started to start crying in his car seat. Carrie was already frustrated, but a crying baby never helped. I was severely annoyed at the whole situation, but I wasn't out of hope yet. I normally leave the garage door windows open to allow the heat and moisture from the dryer to vent outside even if the garage door is closed. I hopped in the car, pulled up so we weren't blocking out neighbors in, and pulled Shane out of his car seat.

Uh-oh. Carrie closed both windows and locked them yesterday while we cleaned the garage.

Carrie did a scan of the house and reported that all of the windows (even Dan's) were all locked. Tensions had already risen by that point. The options were beginning to look like: A) call a locksmith or B) break a window.

I asked Carrie to call Dan and see if his key worked. It didn't. He'd noticed earlier in the week and he said he mentioned it to yours truly (aka me). That earned me a look. I had (and still have) no recollection of him saying it, but I do remember opening the door for him one day in between chasing Shane. I lose brain functionality when my son is around, so it's highly possible he told me and it failed to register.

I took an annoyed Shane on a tour around the house (Yes, we were outside, but he doesn't like when someone else tells him where to go). Carrie was right: the windows were all properly locked down.

One entry point remained I wanted to try.

It would be useless if the sliding glass door to the sunroom was unlocked. We installed a bolt to the doors inside leading to it to prevent Shane for blasting through them and air-conditioning/heating the back yard depending on the weather (the room is leaks air like a sieve).

The sliding glass door to the kitchen could be another matter. Shane and I do go in and out it some and I've had luck as a teenager with them whenever Nana would accidentally lock me out. I scrambled up the deck crying baby in tow, unhappy wife worried on the front porch.

The door was locked. We HAD remembered to secure it. One of our cats, Max, ran over to see what all of the commotion was. Too bad she was useless, or I would have asked her for help. It was time to try one last trick.

I plopped down the boy, got a good grip and then shoved the door up in the frame. It popped open. No windows were broken. No locksmith needed to be called.

You see, most sliding glass door locks are a simple hook inside the door frame unless a bar or a pin is added. If you've ever seen Pirates of the Caribbean, visualize when Will pops the door off the hinges with a lever, but subtract the door falling off the hinges. We had a bar that would've stopped my entry but Shane kept taking it and trying to whack stuff. It was tucked 'safely' behind the refrigerator (Hallelujah).

On one hand, Carrie was thrilled we had access to the house. On the other hand, she locked the kitchen door, stuck the pin in the top, and made damn sure it wouldn't open like that again! We're going to have to be careful not to lock the front door handle's lock in the mean time since no key that we know of exists that will open it. My safety conscious wife visited Home Depot later in the afternoon and I fully expect to come home from work one day and see a new lock and maybe even a new front door. Carrie's been wanting to replace the door for a while and I know her well enough to know this could be the perfect excuse to (or reason depending on who you ask, ha ha!).

Anyway, it was almost a very bad day, but thank God we got in. It makes for a funny story in my opinion.