It usually happens the same way. You step out onto the landing, or onto the terrace, and the door swings shut behind you. The keys are on the table, three metres and one locked door away.
Before you do anything expensive, work through this in order.
1. Check every other way in
Obvious, and worth thirty seconds. A terrace door, a bathroom window on the latch, the door between a garage and a hallway. In apartment blocks, check whether your terrace is reachable from a communal walkway before deciding it is not.
Be honest about risk while you are looking. Climbing onto a balcony from a neighbour’s rail, on a warm evening, after dinner, is how people end up in hospital instead of in their living room.
2. Find out who else has a key
Anyone who has ever held a spare: the neighbour who waters the plants, your partner at work, the agency that manages the property, the family member who stayed in March. A twenty-minute wait for someone with a key costs nothing.
If you rent, ring the landlord or the agency now rather than after a locksmith has opened the door. They may have a key ten minutes away, and if they do not, they need to know a locksmith is coming.
3. Work out which kind of locked out you are
This is the question you will be asked on the phone, and it changes the price.
- On the latch. The door was pulled shut, not locked with a key. Usually the simplest job.
- Deadlocked. The key was turned and bolts are thrown into the frame. More work, particularly on a multipoint door.
- The lock has failed. The key is in your hand and it will not turn, or it turns and does nothing. That is a repair, not just an opening.
4. Do not do these three things
Do not attack the latch with a card. Films make it look free. A bent card is free; a bent latch is a new lock, and the damage is not always obvious until the door will no longer close properly.
Do not force a window or a shutter. Aluminium frames bend, glass breaks, and rolling shutters that come off their track need a specialist of their own. In a rented or holiday property, that repair lands on you.
Do not let a passer-by have a go. Someone always offers. They are being kind, and they are about to push a broken key deeper, snap a latch, or scratch a door that was fine two minutes ago.
5. Make the call properly
Have four answers ready: where you are, what the door is made of, whether it was deadlocked, and whether anyone or anything is shut inside. A child alone in a flat, a pet in the heat, or something left on the hob makes the job urgent, and you should say so immediately.
Photographs help. The door edge, the handle and the keyhole tell a locksmith more than a paragraph of description, and they take ten seconds to send.
A note about the old town
If you live in the stepped streets above the church, mention it. A van does not get up there, so tools come up on foot. Knowing that in advance means the right kit arrives on the first trip rather than the second.
What happens next
A locksmith will ask for identification, or proof of your connection to the property, before touching the door. That is not bureaucracy. It is the only thing standing between your front door and somebody else’s bad idea.
From there the aim is to open the door without damaging it, so you keep your existing lock and your existing keys. How that is done, and when it is not possible, is worth reading while you wait.