Locked Out

So, we got a new door about 2 months ago. Along with the new door came a new door knob and therefore new lock. Unfortunately, this new hardware can be opened from the inside even when it’s locked. The result? Locking myself out of my house several times this summer. As I smoker (I know, I know) who refuses to smoke inside, I frequently pop out onto my front porch from 5 minutes… in my pj’s, with no shoes on etc to have a cigarette. This is usually when I get locked out. But… I can usually walk around to the backyard and go in the sliding-glass door or ring the doorbell until my husband lets me in. I’m sure I look downright scary sometimes walking around my yard with bed head and no bra, but you have to do what you have to do.


However… last night was an entirely different story. We had locked the house up for the night and headed upstairs to bed. My husband was asleep almost instantly, but I decided to play around on my laptop for a little while. When I was done, I still hadn’t changed so I decided to have 1 last cigarette while I read my book before bed. You guessed it….. I locked myself out. It was dark out, I had no shoes on and I had to pee. I immediately rang the doorbell, causing my dogs (who were inside and asleep) to go crazy barking and howling. I knocked, the dogs barked, I rang the doorbell, the dogs howled, and so on for probably 15 minutes. No husband. I went around to the back yard (knowing that I had locked the backdoor for the night but hoping that I could get the kitchen window open… no luck. I knocked at the back door, the dogs barked, I tried to call my husband through the 2nd opened (but tiny) kitchen window, the dogs howled. No husband. I went back to the front door and repeated the same cycle.

I was starting to panic. I had no shoes on which meant I couldn’t even walk to the store to use the phone and call my husband (or my mother who has a spare key), and nothing was waking my husband up. I thought for sure that I was going to be spending the night in the garage. I felt like crying and laughing all at the same time.

Desperate at this point I had to come up with something. I’d been outside for 45 minutes by then. So… I opened the garage, grabbed the ladder, positioned it carefully on the porch (right at the edge I might add) and climbed up onto the roof of our garage where our bedroom windows are. Luckily, the one window that actually opens was in fact opened and I made my way over to it in the dark on my pitched roof and woke my husband up. He was totally confused at first, having no idea where my voice was coming from but eventually woke-up apologizing profusely and took the screen out so I could climb through (I wasn’t going back down the ladder in the dark).

So… I’m sure my neighbors think I’m totally nuts if they say what was happening, but at least I didn’t have to spend the night sleeping on a lawn chair in the garage.

Needless to say, I’m stopping on my way home from work to have a spare key cut that we can hide to prevent situations like this in the future.