So there we were, a lovely, warm, sunny day in early October and the conservatory was dismantled. All that remained were the brick walls and concrete base, which shouldn’t prove too much of a problem with Peter wielding a large sledge hammer. Everything was going well, too well in fact. Something was bound to go wrong.

We were fitting the new exterior light to the front of the house. Basically, this involved Peter up a ladder, with me fetching and carrying various tools as and when required and holding the ladder steady at crucial moments.

The new French doors were fitted and looking good, the sun was shining, what could possibly go wrong?

Now I know you’re thinking this is heading for some sort of electrical disaster, but in fact you’d be way off the mark.

The cable was proving a tight fit through the rubber ‘washer’ type thing in the back of the light fitting, so I was dispatched to get some washing-up liquid to help it on it’s way. To my surprise/horror I couldn’t get in the house.

The door simply would not open. I’d only been in a few moments earlier and certainly hadn’t locked it behind me, the truth was the handle mechanism had broken.

Needless to say, I’d locked the new French doors after the workmen had gone, so there we were, locked out of our own home. The only keys I had on me were for the garage, but I didn’t have the car keys, so we couldn’t go anywhere.

We had access to the tool box because we were in the middle of doing a job, but no electricity on because of said job, so coudn’t use any power tools to assist a forced entry.

I couldn’t understand why Peter was only mildly annoyed by this interuption in proceedings. I was panic stricken. Needless to say, he had already worked out the solution to our problem.

As luck would have it one of my earlier jobs had been to thread the extension reel through the kitchen window so we could drill holes in the wall to fix the new light. It was the answer to our problem. I would climb into the house through the kitchen window.

And that is exactly what I did. I dread to think what we would have done if the window had not been open. Not so much a lucky escape as a lucky entry!