Lock Rekeying in Livermore

Rekeying is work on the key, not on the lock. The cylinder stays in the door it has always been in. The plug comes out on the bench in the van, the old bottom pins are tipped into a tray, and a new stack is built to a key that did not exist an hour earlier. Afterward the door looks exactly as it did, and every old key that ever left this house is metal. In a town holding this much post-war housing that is normally the right answer, because a cylinder fitted in 1958 is often mechanically sound and the only doubtful thing about it is who has held a copy.

The reason this is the busiest page on the site is the Livermore key ring. A typical house has three ways in and three different keys, and only one of them gets used. There is the front door, which sees the mail carrier and nobody else. There is the garage service door on the side of the house, hung by the builder with whatever cylinder was cheapest that year. There is the back slider, which usually has a thumb latch and sometimes a keyed cylinder or a foot bolt. Bring all three onto one key and the house stops depending on the opener. The day the power goes out on a hot afternoon in Sunset East, you park on the street, walk to the side gate, and let yourself in at the service door with the same key that opens the front. That is the whole point of the job.

The price is $25 to $42 per cylinder, and the shape of it is worth understanding rather than guessing at. The $89 visit is the floor. So the first cylinder is effectively the expensive one: a single deadbolt rekeyed is an $89 call, and so is a pair of them, because $50 of pinning does not reach the floor. Every cylinder after that costs only its own pinning, $25 to $42 depending on how many pins it carries and whether it is a plain builder cylinder or something heavier. Four ordinary house cylinders come to $100. Six come to $150. Eight doors across a duplex come back as one figure rather than eight items with a trip charge sitting over them. Because of that shape, most people add the doors they had been undecided about, and they are right to. Evening work starts at $134 and overnight at $169, both counted in before a number is spoken.

Four situations bring in most of this work. Closing on a house, where nobody can ever know how many copies exist after fifty or sixty years of owners, tenants, gardeners and teenagers, so you stop counting keys and change what they open. Finishing with a contractor, where a key handed over in March for a bathroom that ran until August passed through several hands on the way. A tenant moving out of a rental off Murrieta Boulevard or East Avenue, where the ring came back but nobody can swear it came back whole. And a break-up, a departure or a lost ring, where the honest answer is that you do not know where the metal is. In all four the fix is the same one and it is cheap compared with replacing hardware.

Keyed alike is the part people do not know to ask for. Where the keyways allow it, every cylinder on the property can be pinned to one key: front, garage service door, back slider, side gate padlock, the shed, the RV pad gate on a Granada driveway, even the padlock on a storage bay off Las Positas Road if you want to carry one key to everything. Where a door has a keyway the others cannot match, that shows up while you book from a photograph of the lock face, and you choose between letting that door keep a key of its own or swapping the hardware under lock replacement. A master arrangement is available too, so an owner key opens all the units while each tenant key opens one. When the cylinders go back in, you get to try the old keys yourself, one door at a time, and watch them do nothing. It takes two minutes and it is the only proof worth having.

One honest note about the door between the garage and the house, since it comes up on nearly every one of these visits. Yes, it can be rekeyed, and yes, it can come onto the same key as everything else. But most of them are hollow-core slabs with a passage knob and no deadbolt, and rekeying a knob does not make that door strong. It only makes it consistent. If the garage is where your household actually comes and goes, that door is worth a graded deadbolt in a jamb with long screws, which falls under lock replacement at $118 to $299 and takes well under an hour. Say the word and it happens in the same visit, or do not, and the rekey stands on its own. What will not happen is anybody quoting you an overhead door, an opener or a spring, because that is a garage door company's trade and not ours.