Breaking in to your own house as promised

Almost exactly a week to the day after getting locked out of the van we got locked out of the house too.

I picked up the boys from preschool, got home, opened the garage door, and then heard Wyatt say that somebody locked the door in the garage. I checked and sure enough the door between the garage and the house was locked. But it is one of those locks that uses a little pin to pop open so I didn't panic.

I rummaged through the tool box and found an alan wrench and stuck it in the hole. Then I realized that the issue wasn't really the lock itself. The door handle was turning, but it wasn't moving the inside metal mechanism so the door couldn't open. Hmmmmm.....

So I called John and told him our issue and asked him if we kept a key to the house in the garage so that I could get into the front door. He kept saying "I don't understand... why can't you just unlock the door? Did you try actually unlocking the door? How can you be locked out? It doesn't make sense. Then he said that the house keys were locked inside the house. So I told him that my neighbor had a key to the house and I would call her.


So I called my friend Carrie and went over to get our house key. She told me that if I had any more trouble to give her a call because she was an expert at breaking into houses????!!!?!?!?

Meanwhile it was lunchtime. The kids were hungry. Wyatt kept talking about not being able to nap in the garage. He started crying because he wanted his blue blanket. Then Jonah and Sam started crying because they thought that we were going to have to "start living in the garage"! Shane actually laid down on the carpet in the garage because he was so exhausted.

Finally I unlocked the dead bolt on the front door and realized that the top dead bolt lock on the inside was still locked. We installed a deadbolt at the top inside of the front door so that the kids would quit leaving the house at 5:30am and ringing the doorbell (but that's a whole other story...)

So we were still locked out!

Then I called John back. It was 12:30 pm and he told me that he could come home at 2:30 after a meeting and help us get inside. Uh huh right!

So I called Carrie back and she came over. She told me that she has broken into tons of houses using a credit card when friends and neighbors get locked out. She said that it has never failed. So we went to work on the door. First I used the credit card and she pulled back the weather stripping then she used the credit card and I pulled back the weather stripping. We still couldn't get the door open.


So I took off the other door handle mechanism and pried on the inside of it while Carrie used the credit card to try and free the locking mechanism. And finally we got the door open!

It turns out the a metal piece on the inside of the lock was broken and wouldn't allow the mechanism to move out of the door jam. John called the company and they sent us a new part and we are as good as new now.

Then this week at 5:30am Jonah and Sam came and woke me up and told me that they were locked out of their bedroom! WHAT??????

So I went and checked it out (because John was out of town) and sure enough their bedroom door had the same issue. The handle would turn but the inside of the lock was broken. I took it apart and the exact same piece is broken on their bedroom door too!

Is that the strangest thing or what? I honestly don't know if it is the kids or the locks, but I have become an expert at breaking and entering. I am thinking of becoming a locksmith.