WDM, IA - Locked Out

I know what’s wrong, and if I could find it, I’d fix it.

There we were, at 5:00, we did our 4 mile walk while we had a showing and now it’s time for dinner. Gary inserts the key into the dead bolt lock and - Oh, horsefeathers, the real estate agent locked BOTH locks when she left. Now what?

Yep, that’s what happened to Gary and me. We took our daily walk yesterday while we had a showing. Thought that was a good use of our time. Ya just can’t go to the library every day, the librarians are beginning to save our seats for us.

We have two locks on our doors: a dead bolt and a regular lock in the door handle. And, these use different keys. Thus our key rings have 3 keys: 2 for the house and one for the car. However, we seldom lock the regular door handle key. When we go walking, we don’t want to carry a whole key chain so we carry only the dead bolt key. I’m sure you can see where this story is heading, the clues are pretty obvious.

We locked the dead bolt and went walking while the real estate agent showed the house. When we got back, sure enough, the agent had locked BOTH locks and we were up the creek without a paddle or - on the stoop without a key.

We were trying to come up with another solution:

        how about the neighbors who have a key to our house? Nope, they moved in October and we haven’t exchanged keys with our new neighbors yet.

        how about that key we hide in the fake rock? Nope, that key must be under all the new rock we’ve just dumped around some bushes

        how about: what’s the smallest window we have in the house? Sure wouldn’t want to have to break one of our new picture windows? Just what we want to do when we’re selling - break a window.

HEY - what about that realtor key box on our front stoop? Sure enough, 2 keys right in there. Hallelujah. We’re saved.

Oh, but, we can’t get into that box. So, we call our real estate agent who is - in the shower. She then sends her husband who has the magic laser beam, aims it at the sensor and, opens the box up to get out the keys. Luckily they live only 2 miles away.

WHEW.

But, the locked out story doesn’t end there. We got a call in the evening from the couple who just bought Gary’s father’s house. Well, we really didn’t get the call since we were out at dinner with some friends. Then, after dinner, when we were on our way home about 9:00, we realized we had gotten a call, checked the voice mail and the new owners had called us to tell us they were locked out and to ask if Gary knew any secret way to get in.

It seems that the guy who installed their new radon mitigation system had locked the screen door when he had left. Oops. We called back, even though it was about 9:00 now but we wanted to respond. Well, they were inside and had gotten in when Nate, one of the owners had jiggled the door harder than his wife had. Looks like the door was not locked but just stuck.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.