Locked out of your house at night: what to do first

Do these five things first

1. Check every other way in. Back door, side door, laundry-room door, the garage service door, the sliding patio door. People lock the front and leave the back. It costs you two minutes and it ends a surprising number of lockouts.
2. Check ground-floor windows — but only your own, and only if you can reach them safely from the ground. Climbing a fence or a balcony in the dark is how a lockout becomes an ambulance ride.
3. Ring the person who has your spare. A partner, a housemate, a parent, the neighbour who fed the cat last summer. It is faster than anything else on this list.
4. If you rent, call the on-site manager or the after-hours line. Many buildings in San Diego have one, and many of them will let you in for nothing.
5. If you have a smart lock or a keypad, try the app and the code. A keypad that has gone dead is usually flat batteries, and some models take an emergency power feed from a battery pack at the base.

If none of that works, get somewhere lit and public, and call a locksmith. Home lockouts are ordinary work and most are opened without a mark on the door.

What not to do, and what it does to the door

Every one of these turns a short visit into a repair job. Each one describes damage you then have to undo.

• Do not kick the door. Doors almost never fail at the lock. They fail at the jamb, where the strike plate is held by short screws into soft trim. A kicked door usually means a split frame, a bent strike, a bent bolt and a door that will not close properly until a carpenter has been. You are then standing in an open house at 1am.
• Do not break a window. You get cut, you spend the rest of the night with an open hole in your home, you pay for glazing, and you still have to clean broken glass out of carpet you will be finding fragments in for a month.
• Do not slip a card into the gap. It only ever works on a spring latch with no deadbolt thrown, which describes very few front doors. What it reliably does is chew the weatherstrip, score the latch and destroy the card.
• Do not take the hinges off. Exterior doors in most of San Diego swing inwards, which puts the hinges on the inside where you cannot reach them. Where they are accessible, many have security pins for exactly this reason, and a door lifted off badly damages the frame and rarely goes back true.
• Do not attack the cylinder with a screwdriver. A gouged plug or a snapped tailpiece means the lock now has to be replaced instead of opened, and the technician who could have picked it in minutes has to drill it out instead.
• Do not force a key that has gone stiff. If you found a key and it is binding, stop. A key snapped inside the cylinder is a separate job on top of the one you already have — see what to do when a key breaks off in the lock.

When it is genuinely a call-a-pro moment

• There is no other way in and no spare within reach.
• A child, an elderly relative or a pet is shut inside — call 911 first, then a locksmith.
• Medication, a medical device or something else you cannot spend the night without is inside.
• The deadbolt is thrown, not just the latch. Bypass tricks that occasionally work on a latch do nothing to a deadbolt.
• You are somewhere you do not want to stand around at night.
• You already tried something and now the lock is worse than it was.

What a locksmith will actually do

The order rarely changes.

1. They check who you are before they touch the door. Photo identification plus something that ties you to the address. If a locksmith opens your home without asking, they would do the same for somebody standing where you are standing.
2. They read the door. Lock type, whether the deadbolt is thrown, whether there is a second lock, whether the frame has been tampered with.
3. They try non-destructive entry first. Picking, decoding or bypassing the latch, depending on what is fitted. On most residential locks this is a matter of minutes, not hours, and the lock survives.
4. They tell you before anything destructive happens. Drilling is for the small number of cylinders that will not co-operate. You should hear about it, and hear what replacing that lock involves, before it starts.
5. They test the lock afterwards. Key in, key out, door closed, deadbolt thrown, with you watching.

So it does not happen again

• Leave a spare with a person, not under a rock. Fake rocks, planters, the ledge above the door and under the mat are the first four places anybody checks, and they are checked by people who are not you.
• Keep a spare at work or in a bag you always carry — not in the car that is parked at home.
• Consider a keypad deadbolt on the door you use most. A code cannot be left on a kitchen counter.
• Get your doors keyed alike. One key that opens the front, the back and the side gate is one key to forget instead of four. It is a rekey, not new hardware.
• Check the latch on doors that lock behind you. A door that closes and locks on its own is the single biggest cause of this particular evening.