Lock Rekeying in Pleasanton

Repinning is the cheapest useful thing anybody can do to a door. The lock never comes off the house. A new set of bottom pins goes in, and from that moment the lock answers one fresh key and ignores every key ever handed out before. No drilling, no new hardware, no change to the finish you have been looking at for years. The only thing that changes is the list of people who can walk in.

Here the call is usually about arithmetic rather than fear. The front door takes one key, the garage service door takes another, the side gate takes a third that lives on a nail in the garage, and the room over the garage takes a fourth that some contractor cut for himself. Nobody planned that. It piled up over twenty years and three remodels. Putting the front, the garage service door, the gate, the cellar and the office on a single blade is a short afternoon wherever the keyways permit, and it is the change households actually feel: one key in your pocket instead of four in a drawer.

Version two is the purchase. Escrow closes on a house in Vintage Hills or Birdland, and by then keys have passed through an agent, a stager, a painter, an inspector and whoever was watering in July. Version three is the remodel: a crew held keys to the gate and the service door for four months, and nobody wants to chase them down one at a time. Repinning ends all three conversations in a single stop and does it without buying anything.

Brass already hanging in a Pleasanton door usually deserves to stay. A front door cylinder comes off, goes to the bench in the van, takes fresh pins inside a few minutes and will outlast most of what a shelf would sell as its replacement. The honest exception is a plug worn out of round, and around here that is nearly always a gate cylinder that has taken a decade of summers and sprinkler spray on the outside of a fence. Fresh pins in a worn plug hand you a lock that binds on a brand new key, so when that is what lands on the bench you are told at the bench, and the replacement is priced against the published $132 to $352 rather than being folded into a total.

The rate is $34 to $52 for each cylinder, with the $89 call counted once for the stop instead of once per lock. A stop with one cylinder is $123 by day, $175 after eight in the evening and $217 between midnight and seven, and every cylinder after the first adds $34 to $52, which is why five doors in one visit is the cheap way to do this. Which doors they are decides where each cylinder falls in that range: a front door cylinder is the bottom of it, while a gate cylinder untouched since last summer has to be stripped and cleaned before it will hold pins at all and sits at the top. At the end, every old key gets tried in every lock while you watch it do nothing, and that is worth more attention than the receipt.