I had a tough time trying to reach the remote once and ended up starting a new family out of frustration.. the second time it happened, I was able to retrieve it using a child:



There might be two sides to this glitch, one that is reachable and the other that just makes the remote non-existant to the game. Either way, I keep backups of my save files just in case another glitch happens so I can just revert to the progress from the day earlier.