Mountain View neighborhood · 24/7
Sylvan Park: fifties houses, ordinary doors, ordinary locks, and a page with nothing unusual on it
A flat grid of single-story houses from the fifties: low rooflines, a wide front window beside the door, a driveway and attached garage on every lot, mature trees leaning over the sidewalk. No lobby, no gate, no reader at the door. Sixteen minutes.
~16 min
Avg. arrival
$89
Service call
24/7
Availability
This is the plain part of the city and the page says so plainly. There is no credential between the sidewalk and the front door here. There is a knob with a keyhole in it, usually a deadbolt above, a side door into the garage, a gate down one flank of the lot and sometimes a shed at the back. Five cylinders on a busy property, three on a quiet one, and all of them take a cut key. Everything on this site about readers, lobby doors and fobs that have been switched off belongs to other streets. What happens on these blocks is the trade at its oldest and least dramatic, and the prices reflect that: repinning is $32–$50 per cylinder with everything after the first at the low end.
The complaint that brings people to this page is usually the key rather than the lock. On a grid this old the key in your hand is often a copy of a copy of a copy, five or six generations away from the one the first owner was given, and every trip through a duplicating machine took a little more off the cuts. Eventually only one key on the family ring still works reliably and everybody has quietly agreed that it is the good one. That is not a lock about to fail. It is a set of keys that has drifted, and the cure is to read the cylinder, cut a fresh key to the original depths and pin it back to a known standard, which is inside the $32–$50 per cylinder. When the plug itself is worn past that, you are told with it out of the door and replacement is $133–$345.
The other reliable errand is a change of owner. A house on this grid that has been in one family since the fifties has an unknown number of keys walking around: a neighbor who watered plants, a painter, two adult children, a contractor from a kitchen job. Nobody kept a list and nobody was careless. It is simply what happens over decades. Counting the cylinders and repinning all of them onto a single key is an hour of work, it retires every key in existence, and it is worth doing the week the keys are handed over rather than the year after. Bringing the garage side door onto the same key is one more cylinder at the low end.
When a keypad lock does go on a door here it is a choice rather than something a building imposed, which is a different conversation from the one two miles north. Smart lock installation is $205–$505, and the range covers whether it is one door or two, whether a strike has to be moved for the new bolt, and whether the backup keyway is pinned to match the rest of the house so there is one key and not two. Keep that mechanical keyway, and have its key cut on the day the lock is fitted rather than at some later date that never arrives. A house lockout is $138–$252, evenings add $52 and the small hours $92, all counted inside the number quoted.
Say how many outside doors and gates the property has, because the count sets the figure for repinning. Say what the front door carries: a keyhole in the knob, a separate deadbolt above it, or a keypad. If only one key out of several still turns, mention it, since that points at the keys rather than at the lock and it changes what comes off the van.
Nearby
Over the hill, the same van
FAQ
Asked about Sylvan Park
Only one of our four keys actually works. Is the lock on its way out?+
Far more often it is the keys. Three of those four are copies made from copies, and each pass through a duplicating machine shaved the cuts a little further from where they started. The cylinder is read, a key is cut to the original depths, and the whole ring is brought back to one standard, which is part of the $32–$50 per cylinder rather than an extra. If the plug turns out to be worn instead, you hear that with it out of the door.
We just bought here and the previous owners had the house for forty years. What is actually worth doing?+
Repinning, and not much else. Count the cylinders, including the garage side door and the gate, and put all of them on one key at $32–$50 each, everything after the first at the low end. The locks themselves are usually fine and there is no reason to buy new ones. The one thing worth adding is longer screws through the deadbolt keeper into solid material behind the frame, and that goes in during the same hour.
If we fit a keypad, do we lose the key?+
You should not, and we will not fit one that way if it can be avoided. A keypad on a house like this is a convenience, and the metal keyway underneath it is what gets you inside when the cells are flat on a cold morning. The backup key is cut and pinned at the moment the lock goes on, ideally onto the same key as the rest of the property. The work is $205–$505 depending on how many doors are involved and what the strike needs.
Open 24 hours, 7 days
Say what the door reads, and the rest of the call is short
Mountain View and the mid-Peninsula, at any hour. A fob, a card, a code or a plain key, and how many doors stand between the sidewalk and you — that decides the work, and the work decides the number. The number comes back on the same call with the $89 call-out and the clock already inside it, and it is the number on the receipt. The labor carries 90 days, in writing.