Keys are great; they’re small and light and fit into almost every pocket. But their best features also make them one of the easiest things to lose. There’s a reason we have 24-hour locksmith services available everywhere!

Lost your keys again?

Just in case you already checked all the usual places, let’s start with some unusual places your keys could be hiding:

It’s human nature to try and get every bag and box from your car into your home in one go.

You still have to lock the car, so you keep your car keys in your hands and juggle them trying to grab everything else. This is how your keys can end up on the roof of the car or in the trunk; you just put them there for a second and then forget about it while you try to pick up the rest of your stuff.

It’s not unusual for your pet to grab something you use all the time, either to try and get you to play or just because they miss you. If you have a pet, you’ve probably looked for your slippers or socks once or twice, and the same can also apply to your keys, especially if you attached an interesting keychain to them.

Check your pet’s bed and areas they usually drop their toys, and you’ll most likely find a few things there that don’t belong to them too.

If you’re human, you regularly lose & find your keys in the same places.

Have you ever wondered if this happens to anyone else? It does! And to make you feel even better; most other people lose their keys in the same places you do.

If you came home in a rush, with your hands full and maybe even on the phone, the first place you should look for your missing keys is the door lock. It’s easy to get distracted when you’re doing 4 things at the same time, so it’s possible you unlocked the door and forgot to take the key out afterward.

If you keep your shoes under the key hook, that’s the first place you should look when your keys go missing. You only have to miss by an inch when putting away your keys for them to disappear. We tend to keep our keys near our coats and shoes, so it’s easy for them to fall down and hide in your footwear.

It depends on the season but start by checking your pants, your jackets, or coats. We all fear losing our keys, but in most cases, they’re lying somewhere near, so checking all your pockets first is a good way to save yourself a little worry.

We know you already checked there, but our bags are full of things your keys could be hiding under, so a quick rummage through might not do the trick. Take an extra minute or two and put everything out of your bag until you can be sure your keys are not hiding at the bottom or in one of the smaller pockets. And if you do find your keys hiding in your bag, you might save yourself some extra time in the end!

Does this sound familiar? You just came home and you need to visit the bathroom as soon as possible. You put down your backpack and your bags in the hallway and drop the small things you’re holding down when you’re already in the bathroom, on the sink or even on the floor next to the toilet (don’t judge, emergencies can happen to anyone!).

It’s easy to forget about your keys lying in the bathroom when you’re washing your hands or thinking about the food you need to put in the refrigerator.

The counter is most obvious, but also check the refrigerator and the pantry. We often stop at a grocery store on our way home and end up putting the food away as soon as we get home. With your keys still in your hand it’s easy to get confused and place them in the fridge along with the eggs or in the pantry when we’re putting away the cookies.

But in truth, you should be following the golden rule of “The simplest explanation is usually the right one” and look for your lost keys in the usual places you like to put them down.

Your missing keys most likely just shifted a few inches to the left and are now hiding under your wallet or today’s mail.

This rule especially applies to cluttered areas. Your eyes are subconsciously attracted to tidier surfaces, and we tend to skip the messy spaces, since our brain is having difficulty processing all the information available there.

So in truth your “lost” keys could be exactly where you left them, and it’s just your brain creating a blind spot because of the clutter that surrounds them.

So where do we lose our keys? Surprisingly, we most often lose our keys at home. Although, a better phrase would probably be “displace them” since in such cases our keys are actually not lost at all, just hiding somewhere around the home.

If you like to enjoy a few peaceful moments on the couch after a long, hard day, it might be worth checking the couch to see if your lost keys are hiding in there somewhere. Move the pillows, check the creases, and look under the couch, in case your keys fell out of your pockets while you were relaxing.

We’ve all thrown the wrong thing in the trash because we got distracted. You usually take your house keys to take out the trash, just in case, so it’s not so farfetched that you might throw those away, along with your garbage bag.