Lock Rekeying in San Francisco

Rekeying is the cheapest useful thing anybody does to a door. The lock stays where it is and takes a new set of pins, so it opens to a new key and stops opening to every key handed out before today. It is worth doing when a flat changes hands, when a roommate moves out, when work on the building finishes, or simply when you count the keys that exist for your door and cannot account for all of them.

It is also the way to get one key for several doors. A great many households here carry three keys and use one: the front, the garage, and the door at the top of the garage stairs. Bringing them onto a single blade is $28 to $46 per cylinder, and the second and third sit at the low end because the van is already at the kerb. The $89 visit is counted once for the stop rather than once per lock.

There is one honest limit and it is about ownership rather than money. Your own flat door, your own garage and your own gate are yours to arrange on the spot. A shared street gate, a lobby door or a mailroom belongs to the building, so a rekey on one of those has to come from the manager, the landlord or the association. We will still open a shared door for a resident locked out of it; changing it is the part that needs the building. That gets settled on the call rather than in a hallway.

The other limit is physical, and west of Twin Peaks it comes up often. A cylinder that has taken years of salt cannot always be rekeyed usefully, because new pins in a pitted plug give you a lock that turns badly with a different key. When that is what is on your door you will hear it, with the replacement priced against the published $125 to $319 rather than folded in quietly. On the east side that conversation is rare, and a hundred-year-old mortise set is usually worth repinning and keeping.