The perils (and benefits) of bad housekeeping

[resonant]

This week's lesson: To qualify as a door, an object must both open and shut. If it does only one or the other, it's worse than useless.

We live in an old house with beautiful cut-glass doorknobs. They were all nice and tight when we moved in, but over the years, some of them have begun to slip a little, or to rattle a little. I always meant to get around to tightening them all up, but it never seemed like a priority.

Last night the spouse and I were lying in bed talking, and when I got up to use the bathroom, the doorknob came off in my hand, leaving us trapped in the bedroom.



I can only explain my panic by saying that I had left my glasses in the bathroom and that I don't wear underwear to bed (and I keep my clothes in another room), so I felt distinctly vulnerable. My loins were ungirded, you might say.

The light in that room needs a socket replaced -- another thing I've been meaning to get around to -- so we dragged over a tiny bedside lamp shaped like an airplane. In the light of its forty-watt bulb, we banged, rattled, and shouldered the door and attacked it with whatever tools come to hand in a bedroom -- ball-point pens, mostly. We succeeded only in knocking out the other half of the doorknob onto the hallway floor.

The kidlet was sound asleep in the next room, and banging and yelling didn't wake them. I'm not sure what they could have done if it had woken them.

Finally -- just when I was seriously considering whether I could climb out of a second-floor window, barefoot and with neither glasses nor underwear -- I remembered that when I cleaned out the spare room for the kidlet to move into, I put two big bins of office supplies in the bedroom to go through later. So I dug through and triumphantly came up with a letter opener. And, thank the gods who watch over people who are better with adverbs than with tools, the blade was wide enough to catch, and we were able to open the door and escape.

If I ever commission a picture of myself as a mythic heroine, I will definitely be armed with a letter opener. It's mightier than the sword.

And today I tightened all the doorknobs.

edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns

Comments

[celandineb]

I'm chuckling, but with great sympathy - glad you were able to escape!

[fox]

Friend of mine - who lives in a much newer house, but apparently new houses sometimes have iffy construction, dontcha know - once had a similar thing happen: the door handle came off in her hand while she was in her bedroom with her six-month-old daughter on her hip. ... And her two-year-old daughter outside on the landing.

She finally managed to get the door handle sufficiently back in its place that she could open the door and be reunited with her older child; the kid was startled, but not scared or anything, because at least she'd been able to talk to her the whole time. Couldn't tell her to open the door, though, because they've got kid-proofers on the outside doorknobs and her little hands wouldn't have been able to manipulate it. Assuming she could even have reached.

[kass]

That is...awesome. I'm glad you found a solution!

[livrelibre]

I am laughing the laugh of someone who has been in the same old house situation, except I had to call the police and then the fire department to climb up to the second floor and crawl through the window with equipment to get me out. Happily, I did have underclothes and pants in the room with me:) Good times!

[umbo]

I once got stuck in my closet and was late for work because I couldn't get out for about 20 minutes. I didn't have a letter opener, but eventually a bent wire hanger did the trick.

[laurashapiro]

Good thinking!

Scary situation, but it makes a funny story -- especially the way you tell it. (:

[sara]

Oh, jeez.

We've had a similar thing lately where the car has taken to sporadically locking itself. It's done this at least once when the kids and my purse were in the car and I wasn't. Fortunately, the bigger one can reach the door lock.

I have stopped putting my purse in the car before I get in, let us just say.

[carolyn_claire]

This happened to my eldest, when she was a senior in high school. She'd already had a very stressful day, and there had been tears, and then she went into the bathroom and couldn't get out again--the doorknob didn't fall off, it just failed. We were able to pass a screwdriver to her under the door, but even taking the knob off didn't work--the inner workings were jammed. So then I told her to pry out the hinge pins and we'd open it from the other side. She did, but the door fit the frame pretty tightly, so I had to give it a good push to move it, and it came down on her head. It was a day we'll all remember for a long time; at least she was able to work up some "I can't believe this is happening, now" laughter in the process.

[sahiya]

There's something to be said for the screwdriver as well.

Ah well. At least it makes for a highly amusing story.

[kaneko]

Aaargh - my heart is beating faster just reading about it. How awful! I love the image of you as a mythic heroine wielding a mighty letter opener.

[wesleysgirl]

Good grief! Yeah, we have an old house with old doorknobs and we've had them come off in our hands (though not, thankfully, trapping us in a room). Emergency repairs like that just come along with living in a very old place, I think. Ugh! *Hugs* I'm glad you were able to get out of there, at least.

[the_shoshanna]

After reading this post and the comments, I may never close a door again.

[mad_martha]

I'm a firm believer in the power of letter openers! I have one at work which I inherited from my predecessor in post, and while it does a moderately competent job opening letters, its true metier is in doing such useful things as fixing jammed staplers, levering tiny bits of paper out of jammed printers, unscrewing and rescrewing tricky screws, unjamming desk drawers, jimmying broken locks, threatening people who are falling behind on their deadlines, and, yes, on one occasion releasing my boss from his office after the handle dropped off the door!

Everyone should have a letter opener to hand. You never know when you might need it.

[azurelunatic]

That is sincerely unnerving! Those door knobs remind me of the knobs at Grandma's old house.

[isilya]

Being stuck in a situation without glasses is a nightmare of mine!

It's not just you

[beadslut]

http://carbonel.livejournal.com/126245.html