The Key to a Quiet Life (Not)!

“Your neighbour in France has rang” said our daughter, on the phone. 

Not what we wanted to hear, as we’d left Pirette with Natasha’s number in case of emergencies. Pirette has no English and Natasha has excellent French, so it made sense to make that the communication route should there ever be a problem that Pirette needed to let us know about. 

It turns out that Pirette had been opening the house to let in someone who needed to read the water meter – and the door key snapped. And, she explained, there are no locksmiths in the town.

This gave us a number of challenges: 

• Our next planned trip was for Sally to go ahead of me, alone. We would need to get the issue sorted before she arrived. 
• There were two front door lock: a French one with a ‘flat’ key and a UK one with a cylindrical key – the latter bought in the UK to be sure it met the British Standard our insurer required. We didn’t know which had snapped. 
• We theoretically had potential access to the house through two garage doors for which we had keys, but one of those doors had an interior security bar that would prevent us opening it. Still, we could get into the other OK – except that, to get to the house proper and the front door,  we would then need to get past two interior doors, both of which were double-bolted form the other side (and which opened toward us,  so elbowing our way past the bolts was not an option – and would probably have resulted in injury rather than access anyway). 

So how the hell were we going to get in and how were we going to be sure it was resolved before Sally traveled there alone?! 

Here’s the plan as it stands now: 

We’ve been able to confirm it is the cylindrical key that has snapped – potentially the more difficult one to remove, of course. 

I’m now going to fly out with Sally, stay for three days, fly back – and then drive over as originally planned a fortnight later. A palaver and with flights, car parking, car hire and a first night stay in a hotel (as we will probably arrive after dark), that is nearly £200 it has cost us without even seeing what exactly needs to be done. 

We’re having an extra strong magnet delivered to our neighbours in the hope that, when we get there, the piece of key in the lock may not be ‘turned’ too much and may come out – that would be the perfect result. That may be wishful thinking though so, we’re going to get our French tutor to pre-book a locksmith to come out on the afternoon of our first full day there. Hopefully we will have sorted everything in the morning and so can then cancel – but if not, hopefully they will get us in.  

Failing that, we will need to get into the first garage and then break in (somehow) past the first double-bolted door. That will at least give us access to tools and power to get past the second double-bolted door and into the hall and the other side of the front door. Then it will probably be a matter of grinding, drilling and applying super-glue to avoid rollers turning. Hopefully it won’t come to this, though. 

Wish us ‘bon chance’! 

We’ll let you know how it goes.