Downtown and First Street: stone and brick fronts, flats over the shops, and one street door serving the lot of them

Downtown is the one part of Livermore where nobody arrives through a garage. There is no driveway to pull into. You park at the curb, or in the lot behind the block, and you walk to a door that opens straight onto the sidewalk. That makes the shopfront itself the whole job. Storefront door locks are $159 to $449 and the price is per opening, so a single-front tasting room and a corner restaurant with a second entrance on the side street hear two different figures for what sounds like the same work. It is worth two extra sentences on the call: aluminum door with the cylinder sitting up in the rail, or an older wood door with a case buried in its edge, and whether the frame was renewed the last time the space was fitted out.

Kitchens along here keep a steel door onto the service lane with a bar across it. A panic bar or exit device that has genuinely reached the end is $289 to $739, but most of what gets phoned in as a dead bar is a device somebody dogged open at eleven in the morning and forgot about, or a latch that no longer meets its keeper because a hand truck shoved the frame out by a hair. Those get set right rather than sold a new device. A business lockout is $145 to $259, and after a forced door the repair is $185 to $445 with the frame work, the strike and the cylinder listed as separate lines on the emailed receipt, which is the shape an insurer wants.

Above the shops the building turns into something else entirely. One door off the sidewalk, a flight of stairs, a landing, and unit doors wearing hardware from three different renovations. A lockout on a flat is $129 to $225 and the cylinder still works when the technician leaves. Say on the call whether the sidewalk door is standing open, because somebody who cannot reach the stairs cannot reach your flat. That same call settles who is entitled to order what: your own unit door and your own key are yours to arrange, the street door onto the shared stair is not, and that one goes through the building owner or whoever manages the property. Turnover is a rekey at $25 to $42 per cylinder, and two flats off one landing are one figure with the $89 visit counted a single time rather than once each.

The late hours are ordinary business downtown. Dinner service ends, the theater empties onto First Street, and a manager finds the back door will not lock or a resident finds the flat door pulled shut behind them. Nothing closes at the end of the evening. From 8pm the figure carries $45 more and from midnight $80 more, both stated at the moment the figure is stated, which is what keeps a one in the morning call from turning into an argument. Cars left in the lots off Railroad Avenue are opened at $109 to $205; give the row so the technician walks to your car instead of down an aisle reading plates.