Lock Replacement & Installation in Concord

There comes a point where repinning is answering the wrong question, and it is usually obvious to whoever uses the door. A deadbolt that only finds its strike if you lift the door with a knee. A builder knob that spins freely and moves nothing, which is where a good many of the original 1955 to 1968 knobs have ended up by now. A keypad lock on a rental that has eaten three sets of batteries and now refuses every code including the manager one. A garage side door held shut by a hasp screwed into soft trim. A slider handle in Meadow Homes with the thumb latch snapped off inside the casting. Deadbolts, knobs, levers, handlesets and slider hardware ride on the van in the finishes that sit quietly next to the hinges and house numbers already on a Concord door.

The tape measure still comes out first, though on most streets it only confirms what the address said. Sixties tract doors here share a thickness, a backset and a bore, so the correct lock is generally already aboard when the van leaves the plaza. The exceptions deserve naming: Clayton Valley and Crystyl Ranch are newer and occasionally thicker; houses in Martinez and Pacheco are older and can be odd; apartment doors along Monument Boulevard and Detroit Avenue are often hollow metal and want through-bolts instead of wood screws; and any door already changed by a previous owner gets measured from nothing. A door bored for what is going into it takes twenty to thirty minutes. A door that is not gets bored or plated first, and you see the fit before a single screw is driven. Keys are cut at the van, and if one key for the whole house is what you want, the new cylinder is pinned to the doors you already have. On a rental a lever outlasts a knob and is easier on an older hand, which is why most managers along the corridor ask for one.

With the hardware included, a lock is $112 to $285 per door, and the $89 service call is inside that. The $112 end is a residential deadbolt on a door already prepared for it, which describes a great many doors in this city. Toward $285 sit a heavier grade of deadbolt, a lever set, a handleset with its matching bolt, slider hardware, and whatever boring or plating the door turns out to want. From 8pm to midnight the $112 lock is quoted as $152, and from midnight to 7am as $187. A restricted cylinder, a fire-rated leaf or an unusual preparation is named at the beginning once you have sent photographs, not at the end with the old lock lying on the step.

You call and give the street and what the door is doing, and send two photographs, one of the lock face and one of the door edge. The figure is said on the call, because the hardware on that street is already known. The van leaves Todos Santos Plaza, and a text names the technician and gives a thirty-minute window. The old lock comes off only once the door has been measured; the new one goes on, the strike is set, keys are cut, and the bolt is thrown with the door shut against its weatherstrip, since a bolt tested on an open door proves nothing whatsoever. The receipt carries the figure you were given, door by door.