apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

These are very good tips. Hope I never have to use them (and that I remember them if I do)... thanks!

Haha, a few weeks ago the door knob on the inside of my apartment came off while the door was still locked, which quite effectively trapped me in my apartment. I was lucky though because it was during the day so my apartment complex managers were able to get a maintenance worker there quickly. It was such a weird feeling though, not being able to leave your apartment.

Ha! Having been in girlonthem00n's situation as well as having been locked in a public restroom (and having to go under the door--good think I'm skinny), I could use these tips.

When we first moved into our apartment a few weeks ago, we found out the hard way that the bedroom door latch was faulty and sticks if closed all the way. After having a very near lock-in experience (I know, there are worse places to be locked in than the bedroom...), we managed to avoid shutting the door for a few days. Then I came home from work, needing to change for drinks with friends later, to find that the door was shut and very, very stuck. 45 minutes and a screwdriver later, I was in! The down side - now our door has no handle...

I remember about ten years ago here in Poitiers (France), the organist to the cathedral got locked in one night. All the doors were locked, and so he played the 18th century organ full-pipes (3023 pipes) hoping someone would hear outside and react. The problem is that people thought he was practcing, stopped to listen a few seconds and left. In the end he found his way to the roof and threw bits of stone tied to bit of paper saying "help I'm locked inside". One couple found the notes and ended up by calling the police...

here's a glimpse of the building : http://www.sacred-destinations.com/france/images/poitou/poitiers/cathedral/resized/IMG_1212p.jpg
Not quite a *small* room, but I still wouldn't want to spend the night locked in.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the doors are from the 15th century, with HUGE period locks. Your credit card can't help you much there ;-)

I went inside our bedroom closet once so I could pop out and scare hubby. Turns out there was no nob on the inside and what might have been a safety latch at one time was completely immovable. So instead of scaring him I had to knock on the door and ask him to let me out! :)

The credit card is a good suggestion. A rectangle cut from a liter soda bottle works too... should be be lucky enough to be locked in a room which contains both a soda bottle and scissors!

Hmm. I wondering if there's any tune that organist might have played to alert the outside world to his predicament. "Help"?

The organist could have tried playing SOS in Morse code: short-short-short, long-long-long, short-short-short!

I've been locked in bathrooms on three different occasions in my life. Only one of these was as an adult. The first time, I was 5 and vacationing in Sun Valley, Idaho. My friend's brother was chasing us around the house and we ran into the guest bathroom, locked the door and...were stuck. I remember lots of tears, bleeding palms and the fabulous site of our dads' boots through a high, tiny window where we eventually climbed out. (It must have snowed quite a bit that year!)
Thank you for this post because it's pretty much just a matter of time before I'm locked in again.

I was offered use of a "wonderful" Airstream trailer parked next to a beautiful, quiet bay. I was escaping a crazy situation with an ex & in need of a hide out. Sounded perfect & way cool too. The trailer turned out to be a peach & plaid broken down 70's fire hazard. Closed the door to turn in for the evening & the knob just fell off, leaving me, my daughter & her fiance trapped inside. The only correct description was the quiet part & the many hopeful looking tool boxes were filled with cooking stuff (?), windows were not functional & l was already stressed out, this really was the final straw. Fortunately the future son in law has skills and rigged up something. Many years later & in a happier place, we still get a good laugh over that evening. I always carry a pocket tool now.

I remember traveling on a car trip w/ my family when I was a kid...
...at one of the hotels, my little sister - she must have been only 2-3 years old - locked herself into the bathroom and was of course too young to figure out how to unlock the door.

I don't remember how it got resolved - I think I went to the pool to take a swim or something and it was resolved by the time I got back.


Sisters can be so embarassing...

My sister was once renting a house with two other people and while alone in the house the bathroom doorhandle got stuck and she was trapped in the bathroom - a tiny window too small to climb through, no food, absentee landlord and housemates who had mentioned going away for the weekend... luckily they came back to pick up some stuff before they headed off and were able to rescue her, but the story still gives me the heeby-jeebies

i don't understand why the fire department does so many things totally unrelated to fire

Daniel, your organist should have played S-O-S on the organ in Morse code: dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot. Even if passersby didn't recognize the code, they'd know it wasn't ordinary practicing.

While I've never been locked in the bathroom my roommate and I were locked in a third floor dorm room for several hours. A campus maintenance man had to use a cherry picked to come in through our window. It was pretty hysterical the whole time!

The campus apartments at my alma mater were not in the best shape. The doors in particular were troublesome. I had friends who were roommates and they would never close their door all the way because it would get stuck. It took a special wiggle and pull maneuver (which I tried to demonstrate to them) in order to get it open from the inside.

My friend also got stuck inside a bathroom once and had to climb out a window. We called campus security but they didn't do anything but stand around and yell at him to be careful as he dropped to the ground. He was pretty calm throughout the thing and figured there were worst rooms to be trapped. I mean, he had an endless supply of water and a working toilet and shower right there.

Pre-digital cameras, I was trying to determine whether I had film in a camera I wanted to use so I went into my one and only closet because it was the darkest place in the apartment. I hadn't lived there long and didn't realize that you couldn't open the closet door from the inside. I found out the hard way. I kept my toolbox in the closet but I'd left my screwdriver in the bathroom because I'd been doing some work there. Luckily I found a tiny screwdriver I had for my glasses and with it I was able to take apart the doorknob and get out. Now I never close an unfamiliar door without checking first if it opens from the inside!

I got stuck in a hotel bathroom when the doorknob came off. Fortunately my family was in the room and pushed the door in when I started yelling for help. I don't know what I would have done if they weren't there. The window in the bathroom was small and too high to try to climb out. I think I could have yelled for help out the window if my family hadn't been around.

same thing happened to me, girlonthem00n.

this was 25 years ago, when i was living in my very first apartment!

I lived in a pre war apt in NYC and the bathroom door had been painted a million times. My ex husband and I never closed it because it got stuck. One night while he was on a business trip, I leaned against the door while trying to give one of our cats medicine and it slammed shut. I tried everything to pry it open (nail file, comb, etc) to no avail. There was a tiny window that faced the front of the building and I screamed down to some people walking their dog. Thankfully, they didn't think I was a wacky NY'er and got my bldg mgr to open the door with the key he had. Did I mention that I was in my undies??

I got locked in the bathroom as a kid, when the lock mechanism froze, and a grown man crawled in the tiny bathroom window in order to get me out (and when he couldn't find a foothold broke his ankle falling in the tub). Ever since then my family has kept basic tools inside the bathroom, in a shaving kit bag under the bathroom sink, and I've carried that tradition to each home I've lived in (even a simple screwdriver can help disassemble the lock mechanism so you can get out again).

Last week I got stuck in a turkey cage, with no latch on the inside of the door, for about half an hour. The string attached to the outside, tied on for just such emergencies, was stuck in the wooden frame. After trying a million things (credit card and jackknife were too short to reach the latch, and I couldn't think of who to call), I finally forced myself to get down at turkey-butt level (never mind turkey-crap level) to squeeze through the 1' high by 2' wide opening between the inner and the outer cages to reach over and lift up the latch. And of course by the time I had squeezed back through, the door had slammed shut again, so I had to do the whole thing over.

The string has since been fixed.

I got locked in my apartment once. I went to leave for work in the morning to find that my dead bolt had broken in the night (I think it was slowly deteriorating and not that someone messed with it while I was sleeping or anything) and I could not get the door to open. It was a third floor apartment, so there was no going out the windows. There was a moment at first where your heart goes all fluttery and you think SH!T, is this happening? But, then I got over it, called my office to explain that I would be late and calling a locksmith (I knew better than to even try my super). I got bored with waiting for the cavalry and broke out my tool box and removed the dead bolt from the inside. I only wish that the whole office didn't have to know about it as they weren't quick to let me live it down.

I got locked in the powder room of my own house while I was alone. The door got stuck by another door that leads to the garage (bad design...). I could only open the bathroom door about 2 inches.

Of course I didn't have my cell phone with me. I had to meet a friend in 20 minutes and had to go pick up my two kids from school after that.

I ended up using a plunger as a lever to get the garage door out of the way. I was actually pretty proud of my McGyver moment...

I should forward this to a friend of mine, whose office doorknob, for some bizarre reason, is installed backwards so that it locks from the hallway side. I don't think she has a key.

"Fortunately, there was another person around who was able to help us get out." Wait a minute... Us? How many of you were in the bathroom?

Anyway, my neighbour got stuck in her house once when the door knob jammed. I called the fire dept and a huge truck came.. everyone from each block of the apartment complex came out to see what happened. Poor souls, they thought it was a big fire and that their homes could be in danger ...

I'm claustrophobic. I have the heebie jeebies after reading all these replies!

This happened to me once.. it was my last day in a shared house and I was taking my doorknob (the one the house came with didn't have a lock lock, so I replaced it with a locking doorknob when i moved in) off the door to take with me.

Awesomely enough while I was removing the knob on my side, the door quietly shut itself and the knob on the other side fell right off!! This left me with one handle in hand, and the locking mech still in the door with no way to turn it open. My cellphone (of course) was 5 feet away on the other side of the door, and my roommates were no where to be found. There was a window, but it was the third story, and I'm not that brave.

In the room I had a set of pliers and a hammer, and I tried desperately to open the door with those tools.. twisting and turning and jamming them into the lock mech, I only manged to mangle it beyond use. It was at this point (2 hours, and a twisted hunk of metal, later) that I began to freak out (though I was still to shy to yell out the window and try to alert some neighbors.. oh the lessons learned) so I began to hack at the door itself with the claw end of the hammer.

Half way through prying the wood apart was of course, the moment my roommates showed up. I was so freaked (three hours, mangled door, and still no release) by the time they got there I begged them to just break the door down and I would handle the damages.. I don't think I've ever been so happy to hear the word 'crowbar' in my entire life.

Lesson learned, always keep my cellphone on me and never be ashamed to yell for help out the window.. that door was EXPENSIVE!