I’m just curious how many people still do this.
Do you have a hidden key to your house?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
Voted No. I can get in via the keypad for the garage door opener. If that fails, I’ve got a problem as I rarely carry a house key with me.
We have four doors that can be used to enter our home. We have no keys for any of them, so the doors are never locked and there is no hidden key.
“… and by the way, where do you live?”
:classic SDMB dubious face goes here:
Too many houses get broken into here to keep it unlocked. My wife had a key and I have a key.
I lost a key once and had to have a locksmith come and let me in. It didn’t cost that much.
I have a hidden key. But the front door deadbolt can’t be used for stupid reasons related to my laziness, so we haven’t locked that door for at least two years. I have used the hidden key to get in the back door when I was too lazy* to walk around to the front.
*Do you see a trend here?
I have a Meross device so I can open my garage from my phone. I love it but if the internet is down, it’s useless.
Not outside, but in the garage and sunroom where it’s really easy to get locked out of the rest of the house if you forget to turn the little doohickey on the knob.
Eh… I do. But just in my plow trucks glove box. Remote enough that we never lock the house. If someone wants in, they’ll get in. They could work on it for hours and no one would know (unless I came home)
Oddly, I depending on the time of year, do dead bolt doors because they don’t have the standard knob, but a lever type handle. A bear could just swipe it and get in. Both my wife and I had bears get INTO our cars last fall. The simple pull handle is easy to swipe and pull.
I’ve been cautioned not to lock the car doors as the bear will just rip the handle off. And the bears didn’t leave anything but footprints in the vehicles.
Nope, apartment building with a 24 hour doorman who could let me in if need be.
Yup. And my best friend also has a key to my house.
Nope. We haven’t locked our house since we left LA three years ago.
We leave the key in the lock so we remember to lock the dogs in when we leave. Anyone is welcome to turn it and let them out…but I wouldn’t recommend it. 
I’m pretty sure at least one door to our house or attached garage has been unlocked since we moved in eight years ago. We have five external doors directly from the house and one door into the garage which itself has a door to the outside.
One of our neighbors keeps all doors locked including the one between the garage and the house. He became paranoid when one of “those people” moved into the neighborhood five or six years ago. Guess whose adult son was arrested for burglary in a neighboring town?
While I don’t have a spare key in the traditional sense, what I did do was key one of my doors to use the same key my parent’s use on their house. They both work about 5 minutes from my house (and live about 20 minutes away). Plus, it means they always have it on them (without having to carry an extra key that they’ll likely never use). It’s not in lost in a drawer in their house somewhere.
You, sir, are a genius.
Yes. We still have old-school analog door locks, and while we live in the suburbs, it’s a busy enough area that we default to keeping the doors locked (not that we’ve ever had an issue with intruders, in the 25 years that we’ve lived here).
We have a key hidden on the property; it probably gets used once a year or so, when I go out into the yard to do yardwork or something, and accidentally forget to unlock the door before I go outside.
I used to keep a spare key in my motorcycle seat. There’s a secret way to open the seat without needing the motorbike key, and the bike always lives somewhere I can access it.
But then I convinced myself there was a hypothetical scenario where a thief could obtain the key and know I wasn’t home.
So nowadays I have no outside the house spare, and I voted No.
Yes, but the spare key is in the shed, which itself is locked with a combination lock. So it’s somewhere where someone casually looking for a hidden key couldn’t get to it, but somewhere I can access if I get locked out.
Same here. We enter through the garage around 99% of the time. (we use the other doors when we’re not leaving the property, but when we “lock up,” it’s the garage entry we use)
And, just recently, we upgraded our garage door opener to one with a built in battery back up, so that’s good.