Have you considered following the trend to have electronic locks? 

You can download apps to unlock them from your phone, or check to see if they are locked. You can lock them from your phone too – which saves the midnight trip to the door to see if you actually remembered to lock up. You don’t have to carry a key with you either. Just remember a punch code.

It sounds all nice and lovely.

Until it’s too cold in the middle of January and the apps don’t work on your phone to open it because the inside gears are frozen. But that doesn’t happen too often and you can still manually open the door or use the code.

Or the battery dies and you’ve been ignoring the warning beeps for so long and now you’re locked outside.

OR when you go grocery shopping and the lock is working FINE when you leave and 45 minutes later when you come back the number pad is all lit up and punching in the code doesn’t work so you’re stuck outside calling the house OVER AND OVER but no one is picking up the phone and you’re knocking and knocking and ringing the door bell for OVER TEN MINUTES and still no one is coming and there is no other way to get into the house and you’ve called your boss so she can unlock it from her phone but she hasn’t picked up her phone or answered any of your texts and the student who has a room right beside the front door decides that today is the one day this week he’s going to actually go to school so he’s not home pretending to be sick to hear your knocks and let you in and then FINALLY after knocking and ringing the bell and calling the phone for over ten minutes someone actually gets to the door to unlock it but since you’ve just spent all that time being angry now you’re day is basically ruined. 

Or ya know…something like that…