Your First Month in a House Here: Which Keys Are Worth Bringing Onto One

The house is empty and the truck does not come until Saturday. Late sun is coming across a bare floor, the counter is clear except for what the sale produced, and that is a split ring with nine keys on it. Three brass ones worn smooth. Two with colored caps. One stubby flat one with no cap at all. Three that nobody in the transaction could name. Next to the ring, a garage remote with a crack across the button and a sticky note with a four digit number on it.

This is the ordinary handover on the tract streets, in Parktown and Milpitas Manor and the flat parts of Sunnyhills, and on the bigger lots climbing toward Ed Levin. A house here has had hardware added to it one lock at a time over sixty years, by owners who each solved one problem and moved on. Nobody assembled that ring on purpose. It accumulated.

None of it is alarming and none of it is urgent in the way people imagine on the first night. It is bookkeeping, and the first month is the only easy time to do it, because the house is empty, every door is clear, nothing has to be moved to reach a lock, and a technician can work without stepping around furniture.

Walk the house with a notepad and count keyholes rather than doorways. A front door with a keyed handle and a deadbolt above it is two cylinders on one door, and that single fact is the most common surprise on the phone. A typical tract house here comes to five: front handle, front deadbolt, the service door from the garage into the house, the back or patio door, and the side gate. Six if there is a padlock on a shed, seven with a cage in the garage.

While you are at each one, look at the shape of the keyway and whether the keys on the ring resemble each other. Cylinders from different decades take differently shaped blanks, and a key from one family will not enter a lock from another no matter what is done to the pins inside it. Where a house is a mixture, one cylinder gets swapped for a matching one so that everything can finally run on a single key, and that swap is the usual reason a job lands at the top of a range instead of the bottom.

Then write down which door you actually use. On these streets it is very often not the front one. The household comes in through the garage, and the service door behind that big garage door is the real front door of the house. It is also the one that has never been rekeyed, frequently has only a handle latch and no deadbolt, and sits behind a door that opens from the street with a remote whose history nobody knows.

Start with what is free. Change every code: the keypad by the driveway, a pad on a smart lock if the sellers left one, the pad on a side gate. A code set by a previous owner has been given to more people than they can remember, and the sticky note on the counter is the proof of it.

Then clear the garage opener's memory. Nearly every motor head made in the last thirty years has a learn button on it that, held down until the indicator goes out, forgets every remote it has ever been taught. Re-pair your own afterward. Two minutes, no cost, and it deals with the remote that drove away in a car the sellers sold, which is the one thing on this whole list that no work on any lock will ever reach. It is also the largest opening in the property.

Last free item: ask, in writing if you can, who was given a key during the sale. An agent, a stager, two painters, a cleaning crew, a landscaper and an inspector is a normal answer, and nobody involved did anything wrong. It is simply a number worth knowing before you decide whether rekeying is a priority. It usually settles the question.

Rekeying is new pins in the lock already hanging on the door, and a fresh key cut to match, at $30 to $47 per cylinder. The second and third sit at the low end of that, because the $89 service call is counted once for the trip rather than once per lock. Five cylinders in an empty house is well under an hour, and at the end of it every key produced during the sale is scrap metal, including the three nobody could identify.

Do it before the furniture, not after. In an empty house every door swings clear, the technician works standing up, and you can walk from lock to lock testing the new key while he is still there. That last part is the step people skip and then regret: take the new key and lock and unlock every door from both sides before the van leaves. A key that works on a bench and binds in a door has not actually been tested.

One thing not to bother with. If mail arrives at a cluster box at the curb, the lock in your little door is arranged through the postal service rather than through us, because their carrier opens the back of that box. Adding it to the list only wastes a line on the invoice.

Two tests, both free, both about a minute. Open an exterior door so the leaf hangs in the air and throw the deadbolt with the thumb turn, then close the door and throw it again. Easy in the air and stiff when shut means the frame has settled and the bolt is catching the edge of its hole rather than dropping into the middle. On a house of this age in these tracts, that is the normal finding rather than the exception, and it has its own article on this site.

Second test: back one screw out of the strike plate on the frame and look at it. Three quarters of an inch means the plate is fastened to a strip of trim and nothing else. Long screws that pass through the frame and bite into the framing behind it, on the strike and on the top hinge, change what that door will stand up to more than any lock you can buy for it, and they are part of a visit rather than a purchase.

Doing this before buying hardware is the difference between a good week three and a disappointing one. A new deadbolt fitted into a door that has dropped will be forced from the first day, and a keypad on a settled door eats a set of cells every couple of months because a small gearmotor has to drive a bolt that a shoulder was driving before.

First, a real deadbolt on any exterior door that has only a handle latch. On these streets that is almost always the service door from the garage, which is the door the household uses and the one sitting behind an opening that answers to a remote. Fitted, with the frame work underneath it, that is $126 to $338.

Second, a spare key arrangement, and in this city that is a decision rather than an afterthought. Every street here empties by seven in the morning, so a neighbor across the way is a poor keyholder however friendly, and a spare in a partner's bag is a spare on the far side of the interchange for two hours twice a day. Either a lock box screwed into framing out of the light, with a code you change when a contractor finishes, or a person chosen for their schedule: somebody who works nights, works from home, or is retired. Then have them turn the key in the door once while you watch.

Third, and only now, a keypad lock if you want one, at $198 to $496. It belongs on the door the household actually walks through rather than the one facing the street, and it goes on after week two rather than before. If there is a safe in the house that came with it and nobody has the combination, opening that is $204 to $548 and it is done where the safe stands rather than hauled anywhere.

In a city with an old center, the first month after a purchase is about the locks. Here it is about the locks and about one extra question that older towns answer for you: if you are shut out of this house at half past six in the morning, who nearby can open it. On a street where the whole block commutes, the honest answer on your first week is nobody, and that stays the answer until you deliberately change it.

Which is why the free items on this page sit above the paid ones. A code changed, an opener memory cleared, a keyholder chosen by schedule and a key that has actually been turned in the lock cost nothing and remove most of the risk. The rekey is the cheap part that finishes it, and the hardware is last.

One stop covers the paid half: five cylinders onto one key, a deadbolt where there is only a latch, long screws in two frames, a key cut for the keypad. Under two hours in an empty house with the $89 counted once. Arrival averages 18 minutes from the base near Main Street, with Sunnyhills at 15, Parktown 16, Milpitas Manor 18 and the hillside streets 22. Ninety days on the labor, on the receipt rather than in conversation.