Hello everyone!
Being locked out during a sit must be such a stressful experience, especially when pets are inside and the owners are away.
If it’s ever happened to you, how did you deal with it? What steps did you take, and how did you eventually get back in? What advice would you give to someone else in this situation?
We’d really appreciate hearing others’ experiences and how you handled the situation in the replies.
Jenny 
I wasn’t locked out but I was locked in. I was on a repeat sit in an 1860 old school house and the doors are quirky. The lock was a yale with a button to release the lock but it completely stuck and wouldn’t move. The back door only locks from the inside. I was leaving that morning and was going to call the lady next door to see if she could get in with her key. Instead I went into the garage in the garden and found some WD40 and sprayed the lock and it worked after a bit of jiggling. We have to be resourceful as sitters, sensible and not panic. They replaced the lock when they got home.
I managed to lock myself in a stable when the kick bolt on the bottom of the door somehow swung over of it’s own accord. The poor horse looked a bit alarmed by my scrambling over the door, but I’m sure I wasn’t the first to escape that way!
I once locked myself out 20 minutes after arriving at the sit - I went to get something from the car, left my phone inside, and didn’t register that the keys in my hand didn’t include those for the front door… There was no other way in, so I knocked on the neighbours’ doors until I found a lovely lady who had the HO’s phone number. They told me where the keysafe was so I managed to get back in, but I’ve got an address book in the car now with the phone numbers of HOs in case I ever need to call them and I don’t have my phone on me.
So many doors now, shut and lock automatically once you are outside. I had my own door replaced and the guy who came to do it advised a key that you actually had to lock it with, as he said if you have the automatic sort the first thing that will happen is that you get locked out because you have just popped out to the car or the bin.
I arrived at a sit once, where keys were meant to have been left in a keysafe in the garden. However after locating the keysafe, there were no keys inside. Cat flap just too small for me to crawl through. : -) . Thankfully I actaiully arrived early, as had left home, for the nearly five hour drive before well before 5am and m,ade good time. It was just after 9.30am when I phoned the owner, who was still on the train platform to London. Train due any second. She drove back and found the keys inside, in a dish by front door. Her Ex had been over to do some work on the house and had not put keys back in the keysafe. She then left her car in the drive and I drove her to a nearer train station, so she was not too late geting to London.. Had I have arrived nearer 10am + approx. time given it would have been a different story. Now if anybody says keys will be left in a kerysafe or elsewhere I do ask them to check that they are definitely where they should be? Actually happens rarely, as I usually do meet owners before they depart.
Not locked out but kind of locked in… We arrived for our 3 weeks sit an evening before and the host left very early morning next day. They supposed to leave the keys next to the main doors but they forgot and took the keys with them instead. Luckily we could enter the house through the garage, uff!
We were locked out of a sit , before it even started!
Very late the evening before a cat sit was due to start , we received a call from a panicked host. The family had already left and had just realised (several hours into their road trip ) that they had not left the keys in the place where they had told us they would be .
There was a neighbour who had a spare set but they didn’t know if that neighbour would be home when we were due to arrive the following morning and they had not been able to contact them.
We told them not to worry and to carry on with their journey and enjoy their holiday . We would work it out . The next morning we drove from our home 4 hours away with no certainty about if or how we would be able to get into the home on arrival .
Fortunately when we knocked the door of the neighbour they were home and so we were able to get the spare keys and get in . 
The second ever sit I did with THS was in Austin, TX. The lovely HOs had just moved to a new place a week earlier and they were keeping their very smart cat inside until they’d got to know the neighbourhood (understandably).
They had sliding patio doors with just loose ‘jar bars’ that secured them at the base when they were closed. They emphasised that I should shut the doors firmly every time I went out into the garden (they had a dog so I had to go out quite a lot) because the cat was constantly trying to get the door open.
Day 2 (cue doom music) I went out to the garden without my phone (or shoes) and the cat knocked the ‘jar bar’ which I had propped up against the wall down so it secured the patio doors meaning me and the dog couldn’t get back in. Night was approaching.
What I did = knocked on the door of the next door neighbour (who the owners had never met, as it turned out) who were lovely and kept saying ‘don’t worry, we’ll work it out’. Long story short they helped me a call a locksmith who managed to ‘gain entry’ to the house using lock pick tools.
The neighbour invited me round for dinner the next night (naturally I took 2 bottles of wine) and we had a laugh about it but it was a lesson to me to always make sure before accepting the sit that the Welcome Guide has contact details for someone who has spare keys and now I take a screenshot on my phone of that and other emergency details.
My very first THS sit was in an old farmhouse. The door needed to be propped open, or it would shut and lock whenever it did. My first day, I stepped out to grab my luggage from the porch, the door swung shut with the keys just inside the doorway. So over the fence and through the doggy door I went, and never stepped out without the keys again.
It’s only happened to me once… And I was bailed out by some kind of divine intervention.
The main door of the house had a handle-c*m-lock that looked exactly like my own at home, where you have to actively lift the handle and turn the key to shut it. So I merrily pulled the door shut when I nipped out to do some outside chore.. And yup: YEEAARRRRGGGHHH!! The door had locked itself!!
Here’s where the divine intervention came in: For no reason at all, logical or otherwise, I’d a) left the HO’s printed instructions, including neighbours’ numbers, in the hen-house, which I could reach…. And b) I hadn’t, for once, left my phone in the house, but actually had it with me. For some reason I will never understand.
Thankyou, Protective Household Gods of South-Eastern Ireland!
PS I find it saddening that we’re not allowed to post the Latin word for “with”, even if it’s part of a very common English saying.. 
It hasn’t happened to me… yet. However, the recent discussions on the forum prompted a conversation on the subject between my current host and me. Should the worst ever happen, we’ve proactively developed a contingency plan.
The House Key Contingency PlanI’m staying in a fenced house in town (not a townhouse) where the fence faces the street. The main gate key is quite substantial, and with no one available to keep a spare key, there is simply nowhere to safely hide the key outside the gate.
Therefore, should I ever lock myself out, I’d have to climb the fence (my idea) to retrieve the house key hidden safely in the front yard.
I’m not the kind of person who locks myself out. (Maybe happened once or twice in the 50 years since I left my parents’ house!) But I still always ask the homeowner if there is either a neighbor or someone else local with a spare key OR if there is a hidden key on the property “just in case.”
In my experience, HOs always have one of these 2 back-ups. Often both. Sometimes they tell me before I ask, but sometimes not. Sometimes it seems like they weren’t intending to show me the hidden key but after meeting me when I arrive, they feel safer to do it.
I think THS should make it a requirement for HOs to designate someone local who has a key to the HOs house and also someone local who can be called on if the sitter has to leave due to illness or other emergency. These might be the same person or might not.
In the Welcome Guide there is a field for emergency contacts but it doesn’t specify what is expected of these people. THS would have to go very granular in this section in order to ‘require’ HOs to provide a name of a spare key holder. Where is/who has a spare key seems like such obvious information to provide or ask for. I guess it would be too hard for THS to devise an idiot-proof Welcome Guide.
On THS house sit a couple of years ago, we got a knock at the door from the girl next door who looked panicked . She introduced herself explaining that she was next doors house sitter , she had gone out to her car and got locked out , her phone was inside . She ( assuming that we were the neighbours) asked if we had a spare key for next door ? We explained that we were also house sitters so we didn’t know if there was a spare key for next door .
It was a cold winter’s morning, we invited her in and made her a coffee whilst we phoned our hosts and called her host on her behalf . We didn’t get a reply from either host for over an hour so we spent a lovely time drinking coffee and exchanging house sitting stories .
Eventually we received a call from her host who thanked us profusely for our help and gave the address of a nearby relative who had a spare key .
After that situation both hosts said that they would now give each other a spare key incase something like this happened again .
Warning: tl;dr:
Being the prepared (ie OCD) person I am, I travel with a special dog-walking fanny pack. Tiny front zip pocket holds keys. Next zipped section for “recall treats” (ie bribes), back section for my phone. Doggie bag dispenser clipped to the side.
For fear of this exact lockout situation, I make it a point to never ever leave or even open the door without my phone & the keys in hand, or in the walkie bag attached to my waist.
Fast forward to a dog sit in a high-rise in a major metro area. The apartment keys include a fob that gets you into the building, but since the fob is rather large, it doesn’t fit in the usual zip pocket, so I drop it into the bribe pocket with the treats instead. A few days down the road, I strap on the walkie bag & head out with my doggo, tossing a bag of trash in the giant bins in the fob-accessible rubbish room on the way outside.
Because this doggo can be a bit reactive sometimes, she tends to earn a lot of distraction treats (bribes) on walks — so I’m dipping into that now-partially-unzipped pocket fairly often. Forty minutes later we get back to the high rise, I reach into the zippered pocket for the fob and…oh no. No, No No. NO…NO…Nooooo!!!. Keys are NOT THERE. I empty the pouch. Repack the pouch. Re-empty pouch one treat at a time. Trace back to local trash can where I disposed of the 
-filled doggy bags…no fob/keys.
It is hot. The dog is tired & thirsty & wants to go inside. I am silently freaking out. Did I accidentally throw the keys into the trash bin in the trash room I no longer have access to? No — they had to have slid out of the pouch when I leaned over to pick up the doggo’s business. (The dog ‘d 3 times on our walk, but I’m pretty sure I remember each spot for that morning. Or at least 2 of them? Omg I am SO fudged….)
EXCEPT…suddenly I remember that in fact, I am actually brilliant. Why, you ask? Because I always AIRTAG the dog’s collar AND the HO’s keys & carry my phone with me…so as long as I really didn’t throw the keys into the trash bins inside by accident, we should be golden.
I’ll skip the finer details about how Apple’s gps tracking is less than stellar when surrounded by tall metal buildings, and how the keys kept supposedly “teleporting” from place to place whenever I was within 5 feet of them. As it turns out, the helpful stranger who kindly placed them in the crotch of a nearby tree didn’t really do me a favor, but how were they to know I had gps, and that it was too dumb to tell me to look UP instead of down on the ground? But eventually I did, and there they were — thank you, Apple!
I have a small pet sit business and have encountered key, digital, and garage codes.
I carry a tote with all my pet sitter materials to keep everything in one place…it is a bright green and visible with an inside hook for keys.
For a house key, I always wear my lanyard. For codes, I make a copy and put in my car, if driving.
I have learned to make sure the key fits with the homeowner during handoffs.
Thought I would share my story:-
Brighton, 2016. Into the second day of my month-long sit, looking after a sweet but very demanding Finnish Spitz, I was eager to get going on his walk - and I’ll never forget that click as I closed the door. In that instant, I realised I’d left my jacket, with the keys and my phone, hanging on the entrance hook. Knowing there were no open windows to try climbing through, I continued on my hour-long walk… thinking… thinking. What to do!
As I got close to the house after my walk, I spotted a pub on the corner that had just opened for the day and went in. The owner happened to be at the bar, and I explained my situation. He immediately phoned a locksmith friend who could come round within the half hour - however, he only took cash on the spot. I explained I didn’t have any cash in the house and would need to draw it. Without hesitation, the owner handed me a £100 note for the locksmith fee and said, “Just bring it back when you’ve drawn it.”
I was bowled over by his trust and willingness to help. He truly saved my day. Needless to say, the locksmith took literally two seconds to open the door. I handed over the cash, returned the money to the bar owner, and learnt a very expensive lesson. I now check, double-check, and triple-check before I close any door.
Hmm, nice story but the Bank of England doesn’t issue a £100 note.
Scotland and Northern Ireland issue £100 notes, it’s possible that they had one of those 
