On 6/18/2011 2:59 AM, Ned Flanders wrote:

I had the same thing happen to the door between the house and the
attached garage. At first I thought the wife had played a joke and
locked me out but she could not get the door to open from her side.

I put on my garden shoes (it was raining) and grabbed my tools out of
the garage and walked around. I took the handle apart and was able to
manually unlatch it from with in the door handle hole.

It did not take me long to figure out it was the latch mechanism that
had worn out. Fortunately I had a spare from my property managing days.
I installed the new part and the door has worked flawlessly ever since.

In all my years I've never seen this! Anyway, I finally got the old
doorknob off. It was a struggle from both inside and outside. And yes,
there are a lot of plastic parts in there. But the culprit was the thing
that goes into the door jam had broken off the rest of the mechanism and
I had a hard time getting it out of there. I just whacked and twisted
all the pieces trying to break them into smaller pieces that would pull
through the knob opening.