Swapping a deadbolt on a Sunnyside or Semiahmoo door is a half-hour job, because the holes are already there. An old cottage door at Crescent Beach, or a walk-up above Marine Drive, is a different job, and the difference is carpentry rather than hardware. Tell us what the old lock sits in and the right parts come with us.
People ring this number asking for one of two things and the words get used interchangeably, so it is worth separating them. Rekeying changes the pin stack inside the cylinder that is already bolted to your door: the keys in circulation die, the hardware stays, and nothing is cut or drilled. A lock change puts different hardware on the door, which makes it partly a question about the door itself. On the Semiahmoo Peninsula that second question has a wider spread of answers than anywhere inland, because the housing here runs from doors bored in the last fifteen years to doors that predate the bored deadbolt altogether.
These are the bands this work lands in. The figure that counts is the one you get on the phone once we know the door and the hardware, and it is held at the address before anything comes off. The service call in the last row is credited against the work rather than added on top of it.
| Job | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Rekey, residential deadbolt or knob | $35 – $65 |
| Rekey, several locks keyed alike | $25 – $50 each (bulk) |
| Lock change, grade 2 residential deadbolt supplied and fitted | $120 – $200 |
| Lock change, grade 1 or high-security supplied and fitted | $180 – $320 |
| Commercial deadbolt change or rekey | $80 – $160 per cylinder |
| Service call and dispatch | $49 – $75 (credited to the work) |
Most of the detached stock across Semiahmoo, Sunnyside, Rosemary Heights and the newer South Surrey subdivisions is bored to a standard backset of either 2-3/8 or 2-3/4 inches. That is the whole reason a lock change out there is a same-day job at a predictable price: the hole in the slab and the pocket in the jamb already match what any current deadbolt expects, so the new unit goes in where the old one came out and the visit is measured in minutes.
The old beach stock is the opposite case, and it is worth understanding before you decide what you want. A door carrying a mortise case buried in its edge, or a rim lock screwed to the inside face, was never bored. Putting a modern cylindrical deadbolt on it means cutting a new hole through a slab that has been hanging in that frame since the cottages were summer places, then patching whatever the old hardware leaves behind. That is carpentry with a lock bolted to the end of it, and it is the reason we lead with a cylinder change on those doors instead. The old case stays, the new key is the only key, and nobody takes a hole saw to a door from the summer-cottage era.
This turns up more often here than the price list suggests, and it is the one job on this page quoted on the call rather than read off a band, because the labour is the drilling and the jamb rather than the hardware. The detached houses on the hill streets built in the 1960s and 1970s frequently came with a lever or knob entry set and nothing else, and the same is true of a share of the cottage doors, where a key-in-knob was considered the whole security package. Adding a deadbolt to one of those is not a swap. It is a bore through the slab, a matching hole drilled into the jamb so the bolt has somewhere to land, and a strike mortised flush into the frame with screws long enough to reach the framing behind the jamb board rather than stopping in the trim. Done properly it is an hour or so and a genuine upgrade. Done as a five-minute favour it produces a bolt that throws into soft wood and gives you nothing.
Most callers who want this assume the obstacle is the number of doors. It is usually the keyways. Weiser and Kwikset run right through the older rental suites around Five Corners and the family homes in Semiahmoo, while the uptown towers and the newer subdivisions inland lean on Schlage B-series, and plenty of properties have collected one of each over the years: a builder deadbolt at the front, whatever the previous owner grabbed for the side door, a garage entry from a third decade. Two cylinders cut for different keyways will not accept the same key no matter how they are pinned. What we do about it is swap the odd one out to match the rest, which is normally a single cylinder and a small line on the invoice, and then pin every door on the property to one bitting.
The doors that get left off the list are predictable: the garage entry, the side door nobody uses through the winter, and the suite entry where a property has one. Include them when you book and they get done in the same pass.
There is a limit to what rekeying buys an estate owner, and it is worth being blunt about it. A rekey kills every key that currently exists. It does nothing at all about the next one, because a standard blank can be copied at any counter by anyone holding the key for ten minutes: a contractor, a house-sitter, a cleaner on a rotation you do not control. Where that is the actual worry, the answer is a hardware change rather than a rekey. Restricted Grade 1 systems from Schlage Everest or Medeco put duplication behind an authorized dealer, so copies exist only when you ask for them.
One practical note on the high-security cylinders already fitted out there. Medeco, Mul-T-Lock and Grade 1 Schlage all turn up on the estate doors, and they are not all rekeyed from the same stock. Say on the phone which one is on your door and you will hear exactly what we can do with it before anyone drives up a long estate driveway. Morgan Creek is gated, so book with some lead time and settle gate access when you call.
A retail or office unit changing hands is the most time-predictable work we do. A commercial cylinder is 15 to 30 minutes including cutting, and a unit with a front door, a back door and an office door is one visit rather than three, which is why the commercial line on the table is priced per cylinder rather than per visit. In the Semiahmoo shopping centre and the strip along 152nd Street the split matters: centre management runs the building systems, while the lock on your own unit door is yours to change on possession, and most of those units are standard commercial prep that takes a new cylinder without ceremony. Book it for before opening and the shop trades that morning.
Buying your own lockset and paying us for labour is fine and reasonably common. Three things get checked before it goes on: that the grade is honest rather than a box claim, that the backset matches the door instead of the other common size, and, on any frontage facing the water, that you have not spent the budget on a finish and taken a zinc cylinder to the salt side. If what you bought will not do the job we say so before fitting it, which is cheaper for you than finding out in eighteen months.
Mobile across the Semiahmoo Peninsula, from the White Rock core out to Hazelmere, with the arrival window given on the call.
No subcontractors. The number you call books the licensed technician who turns up, and the truck carries stock for most of these jobs.