LAKE BLUFF, IL, October 26, 2024 – “It was my fault. I knew we’d lose the key the minute I took it off my keychain,” said the widow who calls herself “Ridculouswoman.” “I was just trying to give Angelic Daughter a sense of independence and agency. And she’s not the one who lost the key. It was me.”
Ridiculous explained that both she and her autistic adult child, whom she refers to as “Angelic Daughter” had completed loads of laundry within the past 24 hours. When she woke up this morning, however, Ridiculous was seized with the certainty that the key to the laundry room had gone missing.
“I put in a locking doorknob a few years ago when Angelic Daughter became fascinated with doing laundry,” Ridiculous said. “She’d throw just one or two things in the machine and run a full load cycle. Eventually the machine broke. So I put a locking knob on the laundry room door.”
But Angelic Daughter soon learned her lesson, and the lock was no longer necessary. “That’s why I took the key off my keychain, so she wouldn’t have to ask me for it every time she had a full basket to do.
“But when I laid that key, with a red twist tie looped through it so I could hang it from a push pin on the bulletin board, on the breakfast table, something in me knew it was a mistake. I haven’t seen the key since, and this morning Angelic Daughter came to me asking where the key was.”
With a cold feeling in her gut, Ridiculous searched all the usual places she stashes keys, including junk drawers, knick-knack dishes, souvenir mugs, and every pocket in every pair of jeans she owns, to no avail. After breaking off a tiny flat screwdriver in the lock in a futile attempt to open the door, Ridiculous knew a trip to the hardware store was in order.
“Those doorknob kits come with two keys. No idea where I put the other one. And no way I’m paying a locksmith to snicker at me when they come and fix such a boneheaded mistake.”
The Helpful Hardware Man at the local franchise Ridiculous frequents poured cold water on the plan to try and find a matching doorknob set with keys that might work.
“Not with that screwdriver broken off in there,” he said, while his colleague knowlingly added that all the keys in those kits are different anyway.
Instead, Helpful Hardware Man suggested using a “flat bar” to pry off the door trim just enough to be able to see the door button that sinks into the wall when the door closes, and then try a credit card, or the bar itself, to get the button to move so the door would open.
“Well, I wasn’t crazy about the idea of pulling the trim off, because I’d just have to put it back, and I wasn’t sure I could do that,” said Ridiculous. “But it was a better, cheaper option than a locksmith, for sure.”
Armed with a new flat bar ($8.99), a rubber mallet, and an array of screwdrivers (for removing the entire doorknob from the inside if she was able to open the door), Ridiculous proceeded to the basement and, placing the thin end of the flat bar in the very small crack between the trim and the frame, began wantonly whacking away.
To her astonishment, the trim came off quite easily, and just enough for her to be able to see the door button sunk deep into the frame, like Helpful Hardware Man said, and the locking plate attached to said frame.
“OK, well, maybe I can pry the whole plate off,” she thought, but thought better of it. “I just need to get the bar in there enough to push that damn button back toward the door, away from the frame.”
Heedless of splinters flying about, Ridiculous kept walloping the way in to the washing machine until she felt something give, and the door swung open.
“HA!” she said, feeling strong, clever, and thrifty.
Then she noticed a sizeable pile of splinters at the base of the door near the frame. “Nothing a little vacuuming couldn’t take care of,” she said, marching upstairs, with bar, mallet, and screwdrivers in hand, to pop the working part of the vacuum off its stick.
“A little more pounding put the trim back on no problem,” Ridiculous reported. “Sure, it’s a little unkempt looking, but hey, I left the doorknob on so we can wash our clothes now and still close the door without a big opening in it, to keep the noise down.”
Having issued strict instructions to Angelic Daughter never to touch the doorknob again, lest she accidentally lock it, Ridiculous returned to her planned Saturday of gawping at an intensely clear blue October sky, appreciating fall colors, and sneaking Halloween candy.
“Guess I’ll have to buy some more, since they took rain out of the forecast for Halloween night,” she mused. “Better do that before the stores replace all the Halloween sugar with Christmas stuff.”
Smiling while listening to the muted sounds of the final rinse cycle, I remain
your intrepid, laundry-room-door-defeating correspondent, reporting her own do-it-herselfing while referring to herself in the third person,
Ridiculouswoman
Once again our Intrepid Ridiculouswoman achieves new wonders of self-help-fix -it grade A level success! We, her fans, are so impressed.
Now where did I put that key for the small fireproof safe lurking in my closet….
😆