NSV - BREAKING AND ENTERING

So yesterday I babysat my little bro (6) so my Mum could go out with a friend for a belated birthday lunch. Upon leaving the house with all three kids in tow (my son 3 and daughter 1), I make sure I have my keys and slam the door shut. Put the keys in the door to lock it and realise they won't go in due to my partner's keys still being stuck inside the front door. Bummer. :noway:

So after much jiggling the key in the lock, hoping the keys may just fall out inside, and then sticking my arm through the letterbox and trying to reach, I realised it just wasn't going to happen. Next plan of action, get my little bro to try and reach through the letterbox. Throughout these 10 mins it's taken so far, my son is squealing "we're never going to get in the house again!" and my daughter who hates her buggy as it is, is screaming her head off. What a sight for the neighbours.

Right, what to do now I thought. Let's see if I can get around the back of my house and get in the back door... Oh wait a minute, not only is the key to the communal alleyway behind my house on my partner's keys (in the door), but we always keep the back door key in the actual door so we don't lose it - ie - I've got the same problem there as I do with the front door!

So I grab the nearest guy walking down our road, and beg for a spare key... "Oh I don't have one but Bernie may in number 4 may do..." The next 5 minutes is taken up by knocking on each of our neighbour's houses to see if I can borrow their key for the alley.

Eventually I find a neighbour who is a) in, and b) able and willing to lend the key. So now I can march all three children to the back of the alley to try and break in via the back of my house...
So I eventually make it through the alley way, find the back of my house via the bumpy/muddy/hard-to-push-a-buggy-through passage, and then I have no choice but to leave the 3 kids at the back and try to break into my garden.
Well for some time now we've been clearing up the garden (ie putting everything at the very back of the garden until we skip it all) so the already tricky job of scaling the fence was made 10x harder when I had to consider landing in the brambles/bags of rubble!
Fortunately, I managed to shove some of the rubbish out of the way inside the garden and *squeeze* in through the gap in the fence. Climb over the bags/brambles and jump, into the garden - woohoo! :happy:

Next problem - as already figured, the key will not open the back door whilst the key is sill in there from the inside... It also doesn't happen to open the sliding patio door like I had hoped... (well you never know!)

So after a bit of gentle yanking on the door, I can see it would open with a big pull, but chances are the lock would be busted and that would be a big expense to replace. I'm still calling back to the kids every minute to make sure they are still there. My son had now gotten over the possibility of never getting back into our house, and had since moved onto stressing out after tripping over a twig. My daughter had given up by this point and cried herself to sleep.

So I've kinda resigned myself to having to bust the door open... But before I do I think I'd better just check the windows are definitely shut... (Now understand I *never ever* leave the windows open). But as luck would have it, today of all days (ie because I was particularly hassled leaving the house with all 3 kids in tow) I had left the bedroom window slightly open! Woohoo!!!
So now I have a tangible plan...all I had to do was drag our huge patio table over to the back of my house, jump onto it, scale the ivy ridden fence, pull up on my neighbours pagoda and hey presto, I'm on the conservatory roof....

Well I'm not gonna lie, this was the moment I thought to myself, I am SO glad I've lost a couple of stone since moving in - this is just not something I could ever have considered doing when we moved in, and that's even if I had managed to get over the fence, through the rubble, up the fence, over the pagoda and onto the roof in the first place.

The next minute was spent very carefully crawling towards my bedroom window, part of me panicking I'm going to fall through at any second, or worse off the edge into the neighbour's garden, part of me still panicking about the kids being left in the alley, and the other part actually rather enjoying the new view over the city lol.
Sooner than I had imagined, I reached the window, prised it open and managed to squeeze myself through and *plop* land on my bedroom floor.

All I had to do then was shout again to the kids I'd be just one more minute, run downstairs (after remembering to shut my bedroom window this time), remove the keys from the front door, and head out the back via the patio door. Climb back through the hole in the fence, reclaim ownership of the kids, leave the alleyway remembering to lock it, return the key to the lovely neighbour and walk past my house and pick up where I left off originally by locking my front door with my original set of keys...

Now if breaking and entering *successfully* into my own house, and saving myself a fortune in locksmiths, is not an NSV to be proud of, I don't know what is! :drinker:

Hope you all have a lovely day!