Sometimes the Doors Stay Shut

No, this is not some inspirational post about how life’s path sometimes goes in an unexpected direction and turns out to be amazing.

Nope.

This post is literally about doors that stay shut. As in our garage door, and our front door.

Which are currently both broken.

It started on Friday evening – I was in our home office and heard a horrific noise from the garage. It sounded like the roof caved it. It sounded like lightning struck the house. The dogs ran in terror, and the kids said it sounded like something big hit the side of the house. It was that loud. I went into the garage and everything looked in order. I then went outside and didn’t see anything on the side of the house other than one of our trees tipped over to the point where it was almost touching our neighbor’s house. It’s a tree we’ve been meaning to take out, so I decided that while it was still light outside I’d grab our hedgers and begin working on the 4″ diameter trunk of the tree. I put in the garage code, and the garage door began lifting. At about a foot it stopped moving up but the motor kept going. So I pressed the button again to lower the door. Pressed the button again, and this time the door didn’t move.

Ah ha. The garage door was broken. Only problem? My car was INSIDE the garage. Fortunately, Denis was at the gym at the time, so the van was out, but uh…I’d need my car at SOME point.

We decided not to worry about it since we were leaving Saturday morning for an overnight trip to Atlanta with the kids.

When we left the house on Saturday morning, we went out the front door, which we normally don’t use. We always go out the garage. The only time we use the front door is when we are welcoming people into our home. Occasionally the door sticks when trying to open it from the outside, but not all the time. But since the garage was stuck closed, we went out the front, locked the locks and the glass door lock and left for Atlanta for the night.

Upon arriving home today we attempted to open the front door and…nope. Not opening. The deadbolt was open, but the other doorknob was not unlatching. Mild panic set in. We were completely locked out of our house! I suddenly thought we could try using a credit card or something, but Denis made an attempt and it wasn’t budging. He gave up and handed me the card. I jammed it in there for a couple minutes and voila – success! We were in the house!

Now it was time to tackle the garage door. After many attempts to get it open by ourselves, we enlisted the help of a neighbor who helped us get the door up in no time. I quickly pulled my car out into the driveway and then they lowered the door back down. After profusely thanking our neighbor, we looked at the front door and determined the outside mechanism was busted and that handle needs to be replaced.

So now we’re on the hunt – we’ve called the garage door people our neighbor recommended (he had the same spring snap in half on his own garage), and we’re looking to replace the front doorknob entirely so it is functional not just on the inside, but the outside as well.

On a side note: the dogs were REALLY happy to have us home. We had a friend come check in on them a few times in the 30 hours we were gone (she had the only key to the one door that would open (Denis is making a copy of that key today so that I have one too)) and while I know they liked having her husband and her come over, even 30 hours is too much for Dobby’s comfort.