House Lockout in San Rafael

The keypad on a Lucas Valley driveway gate took the code, and the front door behind it did not. A Gerstle Park door hung in 1912 whose mortise lock latched on its own for the first time in living memory. An Eichler in Terra Linda where the slider locked from inside and the ring sits on the kitchen counter. A third-floor apartment in the Canal at nine at night with a sleeping child in the car. Marin Lock & Key opens residential doors across San Rafael at any hour. Calls are answered 24/7, the full figure is named on the call, and a text with the technician's name and a thirty-minute window reaches you before the van leaves the yard.

Doors here sort themselves by neighborhood. Terra Linda and Marinwood have the Eichler pair: a sliding glass door with a hook latch, or a flat front door with a builder deadbolt, and both give way to a pick or a shim in a few minutes. Gerstle Park and the streets off Mission Avenue keep their original mortise sets, and those are opened slowly, because a brass plug that has carried keys for a century deserves a light hand. Lucas Valley and Dominican add a gate, a long driveway and often a housekeeper who holds the key but is off on Sundays. The technician calls from the gate and waits to be buzzed rather than climbing anything. In a Canal building you meet the van at the street door, and the street door is never worked on. Before a tool comes out, your ID showing the address, or a lease and a piece of addressed mail on your phone, is compared with the door number.

House lockouts are named between $125 and $215. One deadbolt on a ground-floor door in daylight is $125. A mortise set with a second locked door behind it, a high-security cylinder, or a keypad deadbolt with a flat battery moves the figure toward $215. Inside that $125 sits the $89 service call; it is not a further line. Between 8pm and midnight the $125 opening is named as $180, and between midnight and 7am as $215. If drilling turns out to be the only way in, you hear why, you decide, and the figure stays where it was named.

You call and describe the door: the lock on it, the age of the house, whether the key is inside, whether there is a gate. The full figure is named from that description. The van leaves and calls from the gate, after the text with the name and the window. The receipt repeats the figure: ID is checked, the door is opened, the bolt is thrown and drawn a few times so you see nothing bent, card or tap is taken on the step, and the emailed receipt carries the same number the call did. Twenty-one minutes is the average across San Rafael. The top of Lucas Valley Rd runs closer to twenty-six and the far end of Point San Pedro Rd to twenty-four, and the text says which.