Locked in! (good story at our expense)

I was changing some of the door locks in the house because they had been installed backwards and didn’t close properly. After changing the door latch in our bedroom, I turned the key to make sure it lined up with the door jam, which it did. Problem was, it wouldn’t unlock again. What made it even more complicated is that Alex also happened to be in the bedroom at the same time and because all our windows are barred, it’s impossible to just climb out a window. So there we were, locked in our bedroom, and the girls on the other side of the door. After trying a few things we called Lara over for her to try the key from the outside; when that didn’t work, we called our gardener over to try to help us out, but to no avail. Finally Alex convinced me to let Lara get the cell phone and pass it through the window so we could call for help. We called Mike; he had a good laugh of course. Getting the door unlocked wasn’t going to be easy – we tried wiggling, wedging, different keys, etc. So Sarah also came over and took the kids to her house. We tried everything we could to get the door open. Then I set to work on the hinge pins. They had been painted over many times, they were bent, and I had no tools other than what my gardener kept passing through the window to help: an iron bar, an axe (should’ve just chopped a hole through the door), a few nails, a screwdriver, some rocks. Getting the top pin out was a lot of work but eventually it made its way out. The bottom pin was a different story – no proper tools, lots of paint and rust, and too close to the floor to hit the screwdriver properly with my iron bar. Then Alex had the bright idea to use some vegetable oil to lubricate the pin, that sure helped. Eventually got the pins out, so now it was stand back and let Mike kick the door in. It took a lot of kicking and pushing to get some movement, but eventually we were freed, with only one hole in the door to show for it. We were locked in our bedroom for 2 hours just because I wanted to fix the door latch. Not exactly how we had planned to spend our Saturday morning, but I guess it makes for a good story.

Like Alex's aunt said, we discovered that maybe

"Yes, those bars on the windows are for keeping desperate people in - not desperate people out!"