The Opener Died and You Have No Front Door Key: What to Do Tonight

In Livermore the front door is decoration. You come home off East Avenue or Isabel, press the button on the visor, drive in, and walk into the house through the door at the back of the garage. Some houses go a whole month without the front door opening for anything but a delivery. So when the opener stops on a Tuesday night, the trouble is not a lost key. The trouble is that the key you need is inside the house, in a drawer, in a kitchen you cannot reach.

That is the ordinary version of this call, not a careless one. A house with three doors on it is being lived in through one of them, which is how the house was designed to work. It only becomes a problem the evening the one door stops.

The useful part is that the list of causes is short, and most of it you can work through yourself in about ten minutes standing on your own driveway. Do that first. Even if you end up calling, you will know which door you want opened, and the figure you are given on the call will be the right one.

Power first. Look up the street. If the porch lights are out on three houses, the opener is not broken, the block is dark. Many openers built in the last several years carry a battery backup that will run the door a handful of times and then chirp at you; older units in the Sunset East and Springtown garages usually have nothing, and a dark garage is a dead garage.

Then separate the remote from the opener. Try the second remote out of the other car, or the button built into the mirror if the car has one. Try the wall keypad. If one of those works and the others do not, the dead thing is a transmitter and a battery fixes it. If none of them works and the opener still has power, the fault is in the opener itself, which is a machine we do not touch.

Then check the other two doors before you assume you are shut out. A lot of Livermore garages have a service door onto the side yard, and on the older tracts it is often the one door in the house that nobody remembers locking. Try the patio slider. Try the laundry-room door if the house has one. And think about who else physically holds a key to your front door, because a fifteen-minute wait for a partner or a neighbor is cheaper than any call you can make.

The red handle hanging from the rail disconnects the door from the opener so the door can be moved by hand. Pull it only with the door fully closed. If the door is partway up when you release it, it can come down, and it comes down heavy.

If the door lifts by hand, you are in, and there are two things to do afterwards. Put the trolley back on the opener once the power is back, following the plate on the unit, and understand that until you do, that door is a panel you can lift from outside. It is not locked in any sense while it is disconnected.

If the door does not lift, or rises a foot and jams, or one side climbs and the other stays put, stop pulling. That is a mechanical fault on the overhead door: a spring, a cable, a roller, the track. We are a locksmith. We do not work on springs, panels or opener motors, and nobody should be wrestling with them off a driveway at night. Say that on the call and we will come and get you into the house through another door instead, which is the part you actually need tonight.

We open a keyed door. The front door, the garage service door, the patio slider lock, whichever one of them is the way in. The opening is made without damage first, and a drill only comes out once you have agreed to it, never to reach a bigger number.

We do not fix the overhead door and we will not pretend otherwise once we are in your driveway. Locks, cylinders, deadbolts, keypads, keys and the doors they sit in is the whole of it. If the roll-up needs a spring, you need a garage door company in the morning, and you will at least be inside the house while you wait for them.

Nobody leaves without a key. If the front door key genuinely does not exist anymore, one gets cut on the spot. If you would rather one key opened the front door, the garage service door and the back slider from now on, that gets done in the same visit.

A house lockout in Livermore is $129 to $225. The $89 service call is part of that number, not a line added to it. Between 8pm and midnight there is $45 counted inside the figure and between midnight and 7am there is $80, both settled on the call rather than announced at the door. The receipt carries the figure you were given.

What moves the number inside that band is plain enough: which door it is, what hardware is on it, whether the door is a knob or a deadbolt or a slider lock, and whether you also want a key cut before we leave. Say which of the three doors stopped you and the figure comes back straight away.

If you want the doors keyed alike while the van is on the driveway, rekeying is $25 to $42 per cylinder, counted on the call so you get one figure for the house rather than a total that grows. Arrival averages 22 minutes across Livermore: 14 downtown, 18 in Sunset East, 20 in Springtown, 23 out in Windmill Springs. San Ramon runs about 32 and Danville about 34, and it is fair to say so rather than promise everyone the same number.

Have a front door key you can actually reach. One with a neighbor you would trust with a spare, or one in the car you drive least, or in a lockbox you screwed to the side of the house rather than under the third pot from the left, which is the first place anyone looks.

Or take the key out of the problem entirely. A keypad deadbolt on the front door is $179 to $449 fitted, with a code you pick rather than one that came in the box, and it turns the front door back into something you can use when the garage will not open.

And while you are at it, get one key for all three doors. It is the cheapest thing on this list at $25 to $42 per cylinder, and it means a spare key is a spare key for the whole house instead of one door out of three.