Just Bought in Livermore: The Doors to Rekey in the First Week, in Order

The reason to do this early is not that anything is expected to happen. It is that for the last several months your new house has been the most accessible property on the street. A lockbox hung on the door through the listing. Agents, inspectors, appraisers, photographers and a stream of strangers came through on weekends. Before that, the sellers lived there for years and handed keys to people neither you nor they can now list.

That is normal for every sale. It just means the honest answer to who holds a key to this house is currently nobody knows, and there is one afternoon of work that changes the answer to a name.

Do it in the first week, while boxes are still stacked and you have not yet started treating the place as settled. It is a short list and it does not need to be expensive.

This is the door your household will use every day and it is the one most likely to be a hollow-core slab with a builder knob and nothing above it. Start here, not at the front, because this is the door that will actually be in service.

Rekey the knob if it is keyed, at $25 to $42 for that cylinder. If there is no deadbolt above it, fit one at $118 to $299 with a thumbturn on the house side and long screws through the strike into the stud. Ask for it to be keyed into the same set as everything else so you still walk away with a single key.

If knocking on the middle of the slab gives you a drum sound, note it and deal with it later. Replacing that slab with a solid-core door is carpentry, not locksmithing, and it is worth a contractor rather than a lock upgrade. We fit hardware to the door that is hanging there and tell you plainly when the door is the weaker half.

The service door onto the side yard is the forgotten one. It sits behind a fence, out of sight from the street, and on plenty of Livermore houses it has the oldest lock on the property because nobody has thought about it since the house was built. It also opens into the garage, which is where the door from the previous paragraph is.

Rekey it into the same set, and while you are outside, hand over the side gate padlock. Many are rekeyable and some are not, and it takes ten seconds to know which. A gate lock whose key was passed around two crews of contractors is the cheapest weak point on the property to close.

The overhead door itself is not part of this. Do the code work described further down instead, and if the roll-up or the opener is tired, that is a separate trade in a separate week. We do not touch springs, panels or opener motors, and we would rather say it now than in your driveway.

The front door comes third because on most Livermore houses it is the door that opens least. It still gets rekeyed, at $25 to $42 for that cylinder, because it is the door a spare key belongs to and the one a neighbor might hold.

The back slider is worth showing us rather than describing. Some take an ordinary cylinder and join the set; some are a sealed unit that gets replaced instead at $118 to $299. Either way, check the auxiliary pin or bar while you are there, because that is what actually holds a slider, not the little thumb latch on the handle.

Then the shed, the detached garage if the house has one off the alley, and any wall-mounted mailbox on your own porch. A curbside cluster box is postal property and its key comes from the post office, not from us.

Change the keypad code by the overhead door on day one. On the newer subdivisions south of Concannon that code was often set by the installer and used across a whole street of houses, and it usually survives the sale untouched.

Then wipe the opener remote memory with the learn button on the unit, following the manual, and re-pair only the remotes you hold. That clears every remote and every paired car mirror button from the previous owners, including whatever is clipped to a visor in a car you have never seen. It takes a few minutes and costs nothing, and it is the single most valuable thing on this whole list.

If the house has builder keypad deadbolts, delete every stored user code and set your own. Their key override cylinders rekey like any other cylinder, so a keypad house can still end up on one key.

A typical Livermore house is three to five cylinders. At $25 to $42 each, with the later ones landing at the low end because the combination is already set, and the $89 service call counted inside the figure rather than added to it, that is one modest number for the property. Count the doors while you are on the call, say whether any of them needs a deadbolt fitted, and the figure comes back before anyone drives out.

Replace rather than rekey only where the hardware has genuinely had it: a key that needs jiggling, a knob that grinds, a deadbolt that will not throw without shouldering the door. Thirty Livermore summers do that to exterior hardware. That is $118 to $299 per door and it is worth doing on the two doors you use, not on all five at once.

Two things not to buy in week one. A camera at the front door, until the door from the garage has a deadbolt on it. And a full set of new locks, when the ones on the house are usually fine and only the key needs to change.

One last thing that turns up in about one sale in ten: a safe left in a closet with no combination. That is safe opening at $205 to $535 depending on what it is, and it is worth a photograph of the front of it on the call so the figure is right.

You say which doors and what is on them. The figure is said on the call, with the evening or the overnight hour counted inside it rather than added later. The van pulls out of the Arroyo Road yard and a text names the technician and a thirty-minute window.

Arrival averages 22 minutes across Livermore: about 14 downtown, 15 in the Jensen Tract, 18 in Sunset East, 21 in Granada and Vineyard, 23 out in Windmill Springs. Pleasanton runs 22 and Dublin 26. San Ramon and Danville are the long ones at 32 and 34, which is worth saying rather than quoting everyone the same number.

You leave holding a key that works on every door on the list, and the receipt carries the figure you were given. That is the whole of the promise and there is nothing else attached to it.