Bill the locksmith

Krakow Botanical Gardens, July 2016

At last something blogworthy has happened. Not only do I have an invoice and a date for the start of kitchen works (which I shall not reveal in case of further delay), but I had the pleasure of a visit from another locksmith. Remember Dennis? It wasn't him, but a similarly delightful man called Bill who fixed the main problem in seconds (the key wouldn't turn in the front door Yale lock) and also installed an unobtrusive 'keysafe' box on the wall next to the garage door.

The key not turning in the lock was fixed with the very simple treatment of lock lubricant ("Some people use WD40" said Bill). I was very glad that I'd asked for the keysafe too because a call-out fee for literally two minutes of effort would have hurt. Then he was kind enough to help me move my dining table out of the kitchen to its new location in the living room, and then phoned a colleague to check how much he should charge me, and effectively negotiated the fee down on my behalf.

On the way out Bill mentioned that my Yale lock could also function as a deadlock. He then proceeded to demonstrate, and found that actually, it couldn't. This turned out to be a professional challenge, and he spent the next few minutes taking it apart it to find out why it wasn't working, then showed me what was wrong, fixed it, and gave me some really useful advice.

It wasn't until I was writing this that I looked back at the previous post about Dennis the locksmith, and I slightly regret that I went to a different company. Never mind, Bill was another treasure.

In the subsequent days my main preoccupation was with choosing the code for the keysafe box, which could be any number of digits from 0-9 (the manual suggests between 4 and 6 digits) without repeats. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult to choose this number - Bill suggested using the four corner digits of the box plus another random two. Anyway, I've done it now, and I don't have to worry any more either about locking myself out of the house or giving multiple sets of keys to different tradesmen.