House Lockout in Martinez
$125 to $229. Porch doors, back doors, the door in from the garage, the side entrance nobody uses. Opened without leaving a mark, and a spare cut at the van before it leaves so the evening does not repeat itself next month. The visit and the hour are both already inside the figure you agreed to.
$125–$229
Typical price
18 min
Avg. arrival
24/7
Availability
Where you are standing settles most of the question before anyone turns a key in the van. Downtown and up the slope through Alhambra Heights the lock is usually a cast bronze mortise case let into the edge of the leaf, worked by a bit key, with a knob riding a square spindle. Around Muir Station and across the flats it is more often a builder cylinder on a rental, changed twice over the years and not thought about since. Out in Morello Park and Vine Hill it is the newer trouble: a keypad bolt whose cells finally went flat, on a door where the metal key taped inside the carton was never cut.
The first of those deserves a paragraph of its own, because it is the reason this shop is set up the way it is. A mortise lock is not a cylinder dropped into a round hole. It is a bronze box holding levers, springs, a bolt and a latch, sitting in a pocket chiseled into the edge of the door, with a cover plate that comes off under a screwdriver. It takes apart, it cleans up, and it goes back doing its job better than most of what would replace it. Almost none of it is disposable, so at one of these doors the first question is never what to buy.
Getting in is done mechanically and without noise. A warded or lever case gives up to a pick, and on plenty of them the latch can be slipped without the lock being touched at all. Every so often the door is not really locked: a century of coats on the stop has closed the joint up, the leaf has bound against it, and the lock has been carrying the blame for a paint problem. That shows itself in the first minute and it changes what happens next. Patio doors are opened at the catch. Lifting a panel out of its run is how a slider stops sliding properly for good, so it is not done. If a cylinder truly leaves nothing short of a drill, you hear so while the drill is still in the case, the choice is yours, and the figure you were given holds either way.
Downtown and the streets around the station carry a good deal of rented housing, and a tenant should not have to produce a landlord in order to be let back into the place they pay for. A driver license printed with that address settles it on its own. Where the license shows somewhere else, a lease page, a rent receipt or an envelope addressed to you at that unit does the same work off a phone screen. Changing the hardware afterward is a separate matter, and that one does need the owner.
Ordinary hardware, one exterior door, daylight: $135, and the $89 call-out is part of that number rather than a line waiting underneath it. The published range is $125 to $229, and what pushes a call up it is a second locked door standing behind the first, a high-security cylinder, or a key snapped off in the keyway. Quote that same $135 door between 8pm and midnight and it is $180. Between midnight and 7am it is $220. Ten minutes covers downtown, twenty-seven reaches Virginia Hills, and eighteen is the ordinary run. Describe the edge of the door on the call, hear the figure with the hour already inside it, and the lock is left working before the van pulls away.
“Door pulled shut behind me around ten at night, keys on the kitchen counter, dog watching me through the window. $174 quoted with the $45 evening in it, $174 on the receipt. Twenty-two minutes, which he flagged on the call because we are out toward Morello. He opened it with picks and left no mark, then put long screws through the top hinge because the leaf had dropped far enough to be scraping the sill. Cut me a spare at the van, and it lives with a neighbor now.”
Sixteen jobs, fourteen of them with a range and two quoted once the openings have been counted on site. What moves a figure inside its range here is what is actually in the door: a cast mortise case that comes apart, cleans up and goes back in takes the low end, while a case seized with a century of paint, or one that has to be replaced because a part inside it is broken beyond repair, takes the high one. Say what the key does when you turn it, and the range closes to a single number on the call.
- Daytime (7am–8pm)standard rates
- Evening (8pm–12am)+$45
- Overnight (12am–7am)+$85
FAQ
House Lockout: quick answers
There is one bit key for the whole house and it is inside. Does getting in ruin the lock?+
No. Those cases were built to be opened, serviced and put back, which is why they pick without complaint and why the plate on the edge is held by two screws. Once the door is open the case can come out, be cleaned on the bench and go home again, and a second bit key can be filed from a blank while it is out. Plenty of households here have run decades on a single key without knowing a spare was even available.
The key turns fine and the door still will not come open. What is that?+
Paint, nearly always, rather than the lock. Coats build on the stop and along the jamb until the leaf is effectively glued into the frame, and the bolt has already pulled back while you are still hauling on the knob. The joint gets cut and the built-up edge taken back until the door swings on its own weight again. It is scraper and chisel work, and it costs less than the new deadbolt people expect to be sold.
We rent the flat over a shop on Main Street and the street door is shared with the offices. How does that work?+
Come down and meet the technician at the street door instead of having it opened. That entrance belongs to the whole building and it stays shut. Your own door upstairs is the one that gets worked, on your identification and something showing that unit, and the receipt names only your door, so nothing reaches the building owner's desk that should not be there.
Related
More emergency services
Open 24 hours, 7 days
Say whether the key meets a keyhole or a cylinder, and the rest of the call is quick
Martinez and the towns around the strait, around the clock. What sits in the edge of the leaf decides the work and the work decides the number, which is settled on the phone with the $89 visit and any late hour already inside it. It reads the same on the receipt. Ninety days on the labor, a rebuilt bronze case covered the same as a new lock.