Danville neighborhood · 24/7
Sycamore Valley: nineteen minutes, the average for this whole map, and properties carrying more outside doors than anyone has counted
The southern valley where the lots get larger: houses set well back from the road, driveways long enough to hold three vehicles, side gates, pool gates and often a detached building at the end of the yard. Nineteen minutes, which is exactly the average across this site.
~19 min
Avg. arrival
$89
Service call
24/7
Availability
The useful first job on one of these properties is not a repair, it is a count. A single address out here commonly carries a front door, a door from the garage into the house, French or patio doors onto the terrace, a side gate, a pool gate and sometimes a workshop or a casita, and each of them arrived at a different time with a key from a different decade. Nobody can say how many copies are in circulation once a house has been through a sale, a remodel and a few years of gardeners and pool crews. Repinning runs $31 to $49 per cylinder, the number of openings is walked and agreed with you before anything is turned, and an hour of that work ends the whole question.
The glazed doors are where the heat shows first. A pair of French doors facing south or west takes the full afternoon on one face while the room behind them stays cool, and the leaf that carries the bolt moves further than the frame it is aiming at. Households stop using those doors around June without ever deciding to, and by August they are treated as windows. That is worth correcting rather than living with, because a door nobody can shut properly is also a door nobody can secure. The work is hinges, keepers and the edge of the leaf, and where the hardware itself has genuinely reached the end, replacement runs $139 to $359 per opening.
The driveways change the shape of an arrival. Nineteen minutes covers the roads, and the last minute of it is spent finding a number that sits well back behind planting, then walking from wherever the van can stop to a door that may be a hundred feet further on. A light at the road saves more time than any route the driver could pick. If there is a gate at the entrance, settle it on the phone: a code, an app, or somebody coming down to open it. More arrival windows are lost to a technician waiting outside a closed gate than to traffic. A house lockout is $145 to $265 and the door is opened without damage wherever the mechanism allows.
The other thing large houses produce is safes. A wall or closet safe left behind by the people who sold you the house, a dial that no longer tracks, or a combination that went with a parent's estate all end the same way: opened where it stands, by feel rather than by cutting, and then serviced and set to a number you pick on the spot. That is $219 to $589 and it is a daylight appointment rather than an emergency. Evening arrival adds $55 and overnight $95, both counted into the figure before you agree, and the ninety-day term on the labor is written on the receipt rather than implied.
Say how many outside doors and gates the property has, since the count and not the acreage sets the figure for a rekey. Tell us how the van gets past a gate at the road and roughly how far the door is from where it can stop, and if the driveway is long, leave a light on at the mouth of it.
Nearby
Over the hill, the same van
FAQ
Asked about Sycamore Valley
We counted seven outside doors and gates. How is that priced?+
Per cylinder, not per door, at $31 to $49 apiece, and the figure falls after the first because the expensive part of any visit is getting a van to your address rather than pinning a lock. Seven of them is about an hour on site. They come out answering to one key, everything cut before that morning is dead, and the $89 appears once against the address.
Our patio doors line up in winter and will not close properly by July.+
That is the leaf moving with the season, not the lock failing. A glazed door facing the afternoon sun grows against a frame that is not growing with it, and the bolt or the latch ends up somewhere other than where it was set. Hinges, keepers and the edge of the leaf are the work, and it is corrected in a normal visit. New hardware inside $139 to $359 is the answer only when the existing set is worn out on its own account.
There is a safe in the closet and the previous owners never left a combination.+
Common on a property this size, and it is a booked daytime job rather than a night call. The great majority of household safes come open with the box left intact, because the work is done on the lock by feel rather than on the steel with a tool. After that the mechanism is cleaned, checked and set to a number you pick and store nowhere near the safe. Describe the make and the door on the phone and the figure lands inside $219 to $589.
Open 24 hours, 7 days
Tell us whether the door has to be pushed before it locks, and the call is short
Danville and the San Ramon Valley, at any hour. The condition of the door sets the work and the work sets the price, so you get one number on the phone with the $89 service call and the hour already inside it, and that number is what the receipt shows. Ninety days on the labor, in writing, covering the frame as well as the lock.