I Came In Through The Bathroom Window

For those of you who haven't committed the blueprints of our house to memory, there are four doors into our house from the outside:

There is the side door, which we in theory have keys to but we have no idea where they are -- presumably somewhere in the Big Drawer O' Keys that we inherited from the previous owners.

There is the door in from the upstairs back porch, which we do have keys to but which has a screen door which flaps around in the wind so we keep it latched from the inside with a hook that is un-openable from the outside.

There is the back door, and the door from the Enclosed Patio into the house works great and all is smooth, but dear readers, there is a secret that we have been keeping from you. You see, a couple months ago the latch on the screen door broke.


One day I was minding my own business and turning the key to lock it, and when I removed the key the lock mechanism came out with it. And while the door worked perfectly fine from the inside, it was impossible to open it from the outside if the door had latched closed. Several times we attempted to jury-rig it in various ways, but none of these were particularly successful and so every time we leave the house we have either had to prop the screen door open with something or walk around to the front of the house when we returned.

So for those of you keeping score at home, this means that only one of the four doors into the house is actually openable from the outside. At least, normally. Yesterday, I returned home from some last minute holiday shopping to find that even though my key seemed to be turning the latching mechanism, the door would not open. Clearly something was holding the door in place, and it seemed like it was on the inside of the house. Now, we like our door very much so I didn't want to be too rough with it, so I tried to find an alternate way into the house.

Of course, as I said above, there is no alternate door into the house, and while Santa would come down a chimney, our only chimney leads straight into the furnace so despite the big bag of gifts I was carrying this didn't seem like such a good idea. So instead I was left checking the windows to see if I could make it into any of them. Of course, like good penny-pinching kids, we had closed most of the storm windows, making it that much harder to get in through the window. But at long last, I realized that I could jimmy the window from the upstairs back porch into the laundry room to get into it and therefore into the house:





Note that in real life, the table in the picture was actually covered with stacks of laundry which I have been too lazybusy to put away. So I swam through the sea of socks and t-shirts and made it into the house.

I went downstairs to see what was wrong with the door, and all I could really tell at first was that the lock seemed to work just fine but that the door seemed to be holding the door in place and now it seemed like it was on the outside. So I removed the lock and various other things until I was able to get the door open and realize that the problem was that somehow the metal strip on the side of the door (which presumably has a name, but for the love of Google I couldn't figure out what it was) had developed a bit of a buckle which held the door in place, refusing to let it budge in either direction..

At this point, my many months of Revivalizing skills kicked into gear and I developed a high-tech super-elaborate plan in order to fix the door: I grabbed a hammer and pounded the metal strip back into shape. And now the door works just fine.

Of course, just to be safe I decided it was finally time to fix the screen door into the back patio, and so I just removed the locking mechanism altogether so now the door never locks closed. Of course, it also never locks so now anyone could just wander into our back patio and steal the very small number of things that we have there. So let's just keep this between you and me, ok?