One Key for Every Door: What Rekeying Actually Involves, and What It Costs

The ring most Livermore households carry has three or four house keys on it, and at least one of them nobody can identify. The front door key. A different key for the garage service door because that lock came from a different box. Something for the back slider. A padlock key for the side gate or the shed that has not been opened since the spring.

Keying alike means all of those locks are set to accept the same key. You are not buying new hardware. The locks stay on the doors, the finishes stay as they are, and only the key changes. It is the least visible work we do and the one people notice the most afterwards.

It is also the fix for a very common Livermore situation: the front door key exists somewhere, the garage service door key exists somewhere else, and the only way into the house that anyone actually uses is a button on a visor.

The lock comes off or the cylinder comes out. Inside a cylinder is a row of small pin stacks; the height of each stack is what makes one key turn and another not. The plug is pulled, the old pins come out, a new combination goes in, the cylinder goes back and keys are cut to it. Ten to twenty minutes per cylinder on ordinary residential hardware.

Nothing about the outside of the door changes. On a 1962 ranch in Sunset East with the original knobs, the roses and the worn brass stay exactly where they are. That matters more than people expect, because hardware from that period cannot be bought again and the modern replacement never quite sits in the same holes.

You get keys in hand before we leave. Two is standard, more if you say so on the call. Every visit ends with somebody holding a key that works, which is the whole point of the trip.

Rekeying is $25 to $42 per cylinder. The first cylinder in a visit carries the setup: choosing a bitting, cutting and testing the key. Every cylinder after that is set to a combination that already exists, so it lands at the low end of the band. A house with four doors is not four times the first door.

The $89 service call sits inside the figure you are quoted, not on a separate line, which is why it is worth counting the doors while you are on the call. Say front door, garage service door, back slider, side gate padlock, and one number comes back for the house. That number does not grow while the work is happening.

Three to five cylinders is the normal count on a Livermore house. Older places in the Jensen Tract often add a detached garage off the alley and a shed. Newer places out toward Windmill Springs often have fewer keyed cylinders and more keypads, which is a different conversation and usually a cheaper one.

Most residential locks in this valley are from a handful of makers whose cylinders share a keyway family, and those go into one set without argument. Where a deadbolt and a knob on the same door came from different makers, one of them may need a replacement cylinder to join, which is a small part rather than a new lock, and we say so before doing it rather than after.

Padlocks are often rekeyable and often not, depending on the model, so hand us the gate padlock and let us look at it rather than assuming either way. Slider locks vary: some take a standard cylinder, some are a sealed unit that gets replaced instead at $118 to $299.

Mail is its own world. A curbside cluster box belongs to the postal service and neither we nor your neighbors can touch that lock; the key comes from the post office. A wall box bolted to your own porch is yours and can usually join the set.

Builder keypad deadbolts, which are on most of the newer south-side houses, have a key override cylinder underneath the buttons. That cylinder rekeys like any other, so a keypad house can still end up on one key.

It is worth doing when the answer to who holds a key to this house is currently nobody knows. Buying a place. A tenant moving out. A contractor who had a key for six weeks. A key that went missing out of a bag at Sycamore Grove. A relationship that ended. In every one of those the hardware is fine and only the key needs to stop being the old key.

It is not the answer when the lock itself is worn out. A key you have to jiggle, a knob that grinds, a deadbolt that needs the door shouldered into place: rekeying a tired lock gives you a new key for a tired lock. That is lock replacement and installation at $118 to $299 per door, and it is honest to tell you which of the two you are looking at once the cylinder is out.

And it is not the answer when what you want is no key at all. If the point is that the kids can get in after school without carrying anything, that is a keypad deadbolt at $179 to $449 fitted, with a code you choose yourself.

There is one honest note to put at the end of a rekey. The door from the garage into the house can be rekeyed like any other, and on most Livermore houses it should be, so the same key works there. That does not make it a strong door. It is usually a hollow-core slab with a builder knob and no deadbolt, and a matching key does not change what it is made of.

If you are already paying for a visit, a deadbolt on that door at $118 to $299 is the natural thing to add, keyed into the same set so you still leave with one key. We will mention it once and then drop it.

The way the money works on any of this: the figure is said on the call and covers the visit, the labor and the parts, whichever of the three doors it turns out to be. The same figure is on the receipt whatever the technician finds once the cylinder is apart. Calls are answered 24/7, with the evening $45 or the overnight $80 counted inside the figure rather than appearing later. An itemized receipt comes by email.