Under lock and key

It was a beautiful day in Ottawa, just the sort of day you don't want to spend in the aisles of big-box home improvement stores. Still, off we went to buy our locks for our exterior doors. As we've mentioned before, we have seven exterior doors; eight if you count the inner foyer door, which is an exterior door on the inside of the house. That's a lot of door handles and locks.

Fortunately for us, friends of ours in Kingston clued us into a new product called the Weiser SmartKey system. It's a neat new product that has a couple of big pluses. First, the design of the system protects it against "bumping" techniques. For those of you who don't watch 20/20 or scary YouTube videos, bumping is a technique used by criminals to bump the pins of tumbler locks or some such thing and easily break into your house. The SmartKey is supposed to be immune to this. Second, we can key all of the locks to the same key without having to hire a locksmith.

There was only one style we liked, so it was a pretty easy sell. We chose the "Avalon" model, which is a stainless steel style with levered handles. John is crazy for levered handles. They're much easier to open with an armload of groceries, and they look nice, too.

Sold.