Breaking and Entering

Any idea what you're looking at? Besides my car.

Any idea now?

Ah! A hole in our door! Kyler broke it. Granted...it never worked quite right since we've moved in, but last Saturday, Kyler broke the handle. Forever locked.

He fiddle farted around with that handle all morning, frustrated and dare I say pouting that he couldn't fix it. Then my parents came to visit, and we sought the help of my dad. The guys messed with it and eventually conceded there was no fixing it. So they decided to bang it on the pavement to see if they could loosen something up. No such luck.

Well, the garage was only about 10 billion degrees and that little hole in the door was letting in a bunch of hot air. So after my parents left, we headed to the Home Improvement store.

After visiting the first one and finding them extremely expensive ($45 and up) and not a good match for our existing handles we headed off to Hardware Store #2.

Brushed nickel, slightly curved handle. Surely it can't be that hard to match, right?

Wrong.

Finally, Kyler cleared the shelf and found a straggler behind all the others and it was as close of a match that we were going to find. After wiping the dust off the package, we happily marched to the self-checkout, ready to get home and plug up the hole in our door. As Kyler scanned our new handle, it showed up on the screen $0.01. What!?

So we went to the self-checkout supervisor girl who called the man in the hardware department to find out what the correct price of our handle was. The man in charge of the hardware department looked at our box, looked at all the options on the shelves and then the craziest thing happened...

He explained that this handle was an old SKU or a discontinued line. And he couldn't sell it for a penny. He'd get in trouble. So he was going to turn off the security alarm and let us walk out the door with it. He wasn't going to argue with us.

And we weren't going to argue with him. We thanked him profusely and then walked out the door with our absolutely free new door handle!

On the way home we joked that we hoped it worked or how would we return it? Explain that we didn't have a receipt because one of their employees let us walk out of the store without paying a penny? It's such a funny story to us.

Comparing the two. The new one on the left and the old one on the right. The old one, we believe, was a cheap-o. We couldn't find any brand name or serial number or a single hint of how we could find a match. So without any leads to find a replacement, I think we did just fine.

And for $0, we have an upgraded, name-brand handle on our laundry room / garage door.

And that's what I call a happy ending to a breaking (the door handle) and entering (and exiting) the store with a free fix.