TWIL: Interior door locks

I complained about how Gary has twice burst into the bathroom while I was occupying it.

“Why don’t you lock the door?” he asked.

“Because I don’t expect my husband to charge about like an uncivilized animal,” I said. “Besides, that’s dangerous. I could fall and you couldn’t get to me if the door was locked.”

“That’s why there's a hole in the doorknob. Why do you think it’s there? Do you think it’s an airhole?” he guffawed. “You stick a long metal rod in there and the lock pops open.”

“Show me.”

An hour later, he admitted that perhaps he was wrong.

This merited dual searches on the Internet, each of us vying to find the answer first.

The hole does indeed let you open a locked door in that you can use microsurgery levels of lock picking as this man does, but most people just pop out the hinge pins and take the whole door off.

I also learned they make decorative finials for hinge pins. Purchased two, of course. Photos later. 

Comments

[Beth]

When we moved into our house many, many years ago it was brand new, and the builder had left small hex keys on the door frames above the bedroom and bathroom doors. Those little keys when inserted in the hole in the knob would open the door.

But with two children the keys had a tendency to go missing, and the children had a tendency to lock themselves in their rooms right before developing health problems. After too many rounds of “Mommy, Daddy, I think I threw up!” and “Why is your door locked? Get out of bed and unlock it! Where is that damn hex key? No, no, no, just grab your waste basket and puke in that!!” my husband turned their doorknobs around so they could only be locked from the outside. And when we replaced all the knobs in the great decor refreshing of 2020 we got “passage knobs” for all the bedrooms and baths. It’s just the two of us and the cats now, but no human is getting locked in.

[theQueen]

Beth - huh - maybe there were hex keys for ours once. But we're the only people who have ever been in the house, so you would think I'd have seen them sometime. I like the idea of having a relationship where you don't do that spiteful thing of clicking the lock and making sure the other person hears it!

[KC]

My parents successfully opened a door lock that way at least once (it was possible to close the bathroom door from the outside while it was locked, oops), but the locks may vary or there may be some specific technique to it or... something? Also I don't remember how long it took...

[theQueen]

KC - It's possible it's just that easy and that we didn't hit the sweet spot with the nail or whatever we had.