As part of my due diligence in preparing to sell our current house, I have been collecting all the keys we’ve given to various people over the years. We have specialized Medeco deadbolt locks on the house which use keys that can’t be duplicated easily, so I’ve kept fairly tight control on who gets keys. There’s only one key I haven’t reclaimed at the moment, and I know who has it.
We got the Medeco locks very soon after we moved into our current house. One of the first things I did after we closed on the house was to lock myself out. I had my two-year-old son with me, and I had to go to a neighbor’s house to call a locksmith. Thankfully, I still had the diaper bag with me.
The locksmith came and unlocked the door with something that looked like a credit card. I was appalled. I could have let myself back in and saved the service charge. My husband and I immediately decided we needed better locks.
In my recent efforts to collect the Medeco keys, I emailed our two adult children and asked them to send me any house keys they had.
Here is the email exchange that followed:
Daughter: I only vaguely remember using a key. I certainly do not have one now.
Son: Yeah I don’t think I ever had a key. I believe that led me to get locked out once when the garage door pad was turned off [for some electrical work at the house].
Daughter: I had to go to [the neighbor’s] house and call Dad once in high school when I was dropped off and the garage door pad didn’t work. He came home and let me in. I seem to remember using the front door when I was home for summers in college (probably after another similar incident).
Me: You poor kids! You didn’t even have a key to your own home? I’m sorry. Mom
The things we forget. I was shocked to be told I never gave my own kids one of the super-special deadbolt keys. But on reflection, I realized I was probably afraid they’d lose it.
We’ve had a keypad on the garage door for many years. It is programmed with a numerical code easily remembered by members of our immediate family, though it would seem odd to everyone else. I struggle when I have to decipher the digits to give to someone, but my fingers know how to enter it quickly enough.
Still, the garage keypad was sometimes unreliable, so I’m surprised we didn’t provide our children with a back-up plan. But we never did leave one of those deadbolt keys hidden around the premises. If the kids couldn’t get into the garage, they were left with “call someone.” In the days before cell phones, that meant they were reliant on the kindness of neighbors.
When have you been locked out?
