A great deal of my time as a locksmith is spent rekeying people’s locks so that existing keys will no longer allow access to their homes and businesses. Usually when moving into a new space it’s wise to rekey all the locks. Sometimes we take that measure but later lose faith in someone that we ourselves have given a key to. Here are a few situations I’ve encountered where rekeying was clearly the right course of action:

-A landlord called me up requesting an urgent rekey of his rental property on Mercer Island. His tenant had been taking a nap on her sofa when an unfamiliar young man walked in, announcing to the house that he was home. He had been backpacking in Europe and while he was gone his family moved without telling him. His key still worked, though.

-A woman in Newcastle left her dog in the care of a female house sitter while she went on vacation. She had cameras set up in her house so she could watch her dog throughout the workday, and the house sitter turned them to face the walls. She reasoned that someone staying in a hotel room wouldn’t want to be subject to video monitoring, and so she shrugged it off. What she did not shrug off was when she came home a day early and walked through her master bedroom only to find an unknown man taking a bubble bath in her tub. The married house sitter had been using the gig as an opportunity to meet with a paramour, and left him in the house while she went to work.

-A widow in North Seattle came home from the grocery store and found her next-door neighbor standing in her bedroom. When she asked him what he was doing and how he got in, he explained that he still had the key from when the previous owner lived there, and that he’d come in because he was “just curious.” In addition to this being outrageously inappropriate, it was also rather unfortunate because the woman had been good friends with him and his wife, and this incident would be hard to get past.

I don’t even like it when unexpected visitors knock on my front door, so I can’t imagine how unhappy I would be if I found one on the other side of that sacred barrier. Thinking back on these incidents, I almost want to rekey my own house just for good measure.