1 Key(s) to My Home Loving Heart

Weekends are made for the pure satisfaction of scratching around-the-house projects off of to-do lists. It just feels so stinkin’ good to knock out the little items that have been nagging at you for ages. Case in point: cleaning out the junk drawer.

We all have one and, let’s be honest with ourselves, even the neatest of neat freaks needs that one designated spot where it’s alright to be a little junkie. While I’ve not completely fallen off the clutter-free deep end, I am a firm believer that everything has its place. Towels folded neatly in the linen closet. Water glasses to the right of the sink…but still I can appreciate a junk drawer’s ability to conceal the random assortment of items necessary to keep a household in working order: batteries, sticky notes, the pile of 35 house keys the former owners left behind…

35  house keys? It’s true. While most home buyers are lucky if they end up with one set of house keys on closing day—the lord has really blessed you if karma is good enough to leave you a spare—my sweet, darling angel of a previous owner not only left me a spare (or two) but must have rounded up every copy of every key to every lock that she passed out to every person she met in her 104 year-old life before she packed up and got out of dodge.

I could have just kept a hand full for a rainy day, tossed the rest and considered my junk drawer clean-out nearly completed, right? This would be true if there weren’t 7 different exterior locks on my house. 7 different exterior locks all of which require a different key…which were piled unlabeled in my junk drawer.

Let’s do the math…

 

Matching each key to each lock definitely made me feel like I was on a ridiculously addictive beat-the-clock game show, but with no million dollar prize waiting for me at the finish line, I had to settle with a parting gift of a newly color coded set of house keys…complete with rape whistle.