When we lived in California, I had two key rings. One for my motorcycle (house and bike keys) and one for my car (house, car, storage shed, car alarm). Since we do not plan on owning a car in Ecuador, I expected to be able to simplify my pocket and have only a single key ring with just a single house key. Heck — no need for a key ring at all. I figured I would just stick the single house key in my “coin pocket” of my blue jeans.
Ha!
Yes, every one of those keys in the image above is now needed. They originally were all on one ring, but we split them up, since we don’t really need all of them at the same time — and I didn’t want a bulge in my pocket the size of a baseball !
The upper-left red key ring is the one we carry whenever we leave the house. There are 5 keys on that ring, and each is needed to get from the front door to the street. Evelyn placed them in order of being needed, which helps make it a little less confusing to reach the street (or conversely, to get back into the house). The keys are:
- House front door
- Grate in front of that door
- Elevator
- Grate to exit residence portion of building
- Grate to exit the external wall (at the end of the driveway)
The blue key ring (center-left) gives us access to our parking spot. Since we don’t have a car, we keep those separate and rarely use them at this point. When we do need to park a car though, we need two keys for the front driveway gate, then another key for the parking spot itself.
The yellow key ring gives us access to the rooftop, a storage area where we keep the propane tanks (more on those in a later post), and our washer/dryer.
The other keys are for inside the condo, opening various locked cabinets left us by the sellers, and a safe that we had installed.
When I first saw all these keys, I was overwhelmed. After a month, we are getting used to it though. After awhile, it just become the “new normal.”