Pleasanton neighborhood · 24/7
Vintage Hills: eighties houses on the slope, bigger lots, and a pool gate whose lock has not moved since last summer
Eighties houses stepped up the slope on larger parcels: longer driveways, terraced yards, a side path around to the back, and a pool behind most of them with a gate and a latch of its own. Nineteen minutes, which is exactly the citywide average.
4.9 / 5· 274 reviews from Pleasanton and the Tri-Valley
~19 min
Avg. arrival
$89
Service call
24/7
Availability
Count the locks on one of these parcels and you get seven or eight, not one. Front entry, the service door into the garage, a door from the kitchen onto the side path, a slider onto the deck, a pedestrian gate at the side, the pool gate, and a shed or a pump house cut into the slope somewhere. The pool gate is the one that stops people, and always in the same week: the first warm weekend, when a lock that has not been touched since last September is dry, full of grit and refuses the key that was cut for it. Servicing it and pinning it onto a key you already carry is $34–$52 per cylinder. Where the latch itself has given up, hardware is $132–$352, and the leaf gets lined up before anything new goes on it, because a latch cannot find a keeper that has moved.
The gates take the worst of the weather because they are the only hardware here that lives outdoors all year. On a slope a post shifts with the ground under it, the bolt stops meeting its keeper, and a padlock that has hung on the side gate for a decade seizes with the key still working perfectly. The usual state of a Vintage Hills lot is a pool gate that latches, a side gate that has not locked in years and no key for either that anybody can produce. Realigning the latch, moving the keeper to where the bolt actually lands and fitting a cylinder or padlock keyed to the house is the whole job, priced by what the leaf needs inside $132–$352.
Long ownership on these parcels stacks hardware from three decades onto one property: an original knob set, a deadbolt added later, a keypad on the side entry from a couple of years ago, and a padlock on the shed that rusted open at some point and hangs there for show. Three keys where one would do, and usually one of the three no longer turns at all. Bringing the property onto a single key is per cylinder rather than per house — $34–$52 each with everything after the first at the low end — and if a plug is worn past pinning you look at it with us, out of the door and in daylight, at $132–$352 to replace. The same ownership produces the other errand out here: a safe left by an earlier owner, opened where it stands at $216–$570 and reset afterward to a number you choose.
Two practical notes about the slope. Nineteen minutes is the real run to these streets and it is the citywide average, not a rounded-down figure; you hear it on the phone rather than discovering it on the driveway. And addresses up here are hard to read after dark, so say what marks the mouth of the driveway and leave a light on at the road if you can. A house lockout is $134–$255 with the $89 call-out inside it, $52 added between eight at night and midnight and $94 between midnight and seven, all quoted before the van moves, with identification checked at the step.
Walk the lot and count the locks before calling, because the pool gate, the shed and the pump house are the three that get left off the list. If it is the pool gate, say when it was last opened and whether the latch still catches. Describe what marks the driveway from the road, since numbers are unreadable from a moving van after dark.
Nearby
Over the hill, the same van
FAQ
Asked about Vintage Hills
The pool gate key turns and nothing happens. First warm weekend of the year.+
That is the most common call from this neighborhood and the cause is almost never the key. A cylinder that has stood outdoors untouched since September is dry and full of grit, so the plug turns a little and the pins never lift into line. It gets opened, cleaned, serviced and pinned onto a key you already carry at $34–$52. If the latch itself is finished, hardware is $132–$352, and the leaf and keeper get lined up first, because a latch cannot catch a keeper that has moved with the post.
There are eight locks on this property. How is a repin priced?+
One cylinder at a time, $34–$52 each, and only the first carries the trip, so the rest sit at the low end. Eight openings is most of a morning, and it ends with the house, the garage service door, the side gate, the pool gate and the shed all answering to a single key you can actually hand to somebody. Do the walk first and write the list down: the pump house cover and the gate at the bottom of the yard are the two that get missed, and they are also the two nobody has had a key for in years.
There is a safe in the closet and the sellers did not leave a combination.+
It gets opened where it stands, at $216–$570, and in most cases the door survives the process so the safe stays worth keeping. Three answers make the visit shorter: dial or keypad, roughly how tall, and whether it sits in a wall, on the floor or in the slab, because those call for different tools out of the van. Afterward it is set to a combination you choose and keep somewhere other than the room the safe is in. Go in knowing a fair share of them turn out empty.
Open 24 hours, 7 days
Name the door, and say how long since anyone used it
Pleasanton, whatever the hour, every day of the year. An entry in the tracts, a seized gate latch on a hill street, a pool gate, a safe left behind by the last owners, a shop door on Main, a car sitting in the Stoneridge lot — that is what decides the work, and the work decides the figure. You get that figure on this call with the $89 drive and the clock already inside it, and it is the figure on the invoice. Ninety days on the labor, in writing. The van is a few doors off Main.