A latch that wants a shoulder behind it, a deadbolt that stops three quarters of the way in, a patio slider whose hooks no longer pull home. Fast Locksmith Richmond repairs doors, frames and door hardware at any address inside the city limits, same day, mobile, with the price settled on the phone rather than at the end of the job.
Richmond is flat and grid planned, so a van reaches every address much the same way. The doors are nothing like as uniform: a 1948 Burkeville bungalow entry, a mortise body buried in the edge of a Steveston slab, a European multi-point on a custom build at the Terra Nova dyke edge.
Most of what reaches us described as a broken lock turns out to be a door that has moved. There is a test you can run before you pick up the phone. Swing the door wide open, turn the key, and watch the bolt. If it travels its full length with the door open and then jams the moment the door is shut, the cylinder is innocent: the bolt is now arriving where the strike pocket no longer is. That single observation decides whether the visit is twenty minutes of strike work or a hardware job, and it is worth making before anyone buys a replacement deadbolt.
Two different things put a Richmond door into that state, and they keep different schedules. Wood-frame townhomes take it on seasonally. The Hamilton stock north of Westminster Highway is almost all wood frame from the 1990s and 2000s, and through the wet months the slab and the jamb both swell until the latch presses against the strike instead of dropping into it. By August the same door behaves. Older detached frames take it on permanently instead. The 1960s and 1970s houses in Thompson, on the grid between No. 1 Road and No. 2 Road, and the late-1960s through 1980s houses out in Seafair have had decades to settle a few millimetres, and a door in that condition does not recover in July. Steveston gets both at once, because the oldest homes there sit closest to the water and in the oldest frames in the city.
Three repairs cover nearly all of it, and which one applies is settled by where the door binds rather than by preference. If the bolt is landing short of its pocket while the slab still closes cleanly onto its stop, the strike moves and nothing comes off the door at all. If the bolt reaches the pocket but cannot travel its full length inside it, the strike mortise gets deepened behind it. A plane only comes out when the slab itself is jammed in the opening, and then it goes on the edge that is genuinely rubbing, which on a settled door is far more often the top corner of the latch side than the whole edge. That order matters if you are also having new hardware fitted, because a deadbolt bought to replace one that never seated will not seat either.
On Richmond's detached streets the door that fails is rarely the front one. In Broadmoor many houses carry the deadbolt on the main entry and a second keyed lock somewhere behind it, on the door in from the garage, a side entry or a garden gate, and that second one is what nobody looks at until it stops latching. One boundary is worth settling before you book. If the thing that has failed swings on hinges and turns on a key, whichever wall it is in, it is a repair we do. If it is the powered overhead panel and the remote is sitting on the seat inside, it is not, because that belongs to the garage door trade rather than to a locksmith, and you will hear so on the phone rather than after a van has arrived.
Some of it genuinely is the hardware, and two failures show up here often enough to name. A knob you have to lift while turning before the latch will catch has a worn cam, not a misaligned door, and on the original Kwikset knob sets still in service across Thompson that is usually the verdict. The 1990s and early-2000s townhome complexes in East Cambie run a variation of their own: original Weiser knob-and-deadbolt sets where the cam spring has gone soft and slop has developed in the latch. Replacement cams for most Weiser knob styles ride on the van, so that gets repaired on the visit instead of turning into a whole new entry set, which matters when the deadbolt cylinder next to it is still perfectly good.
What a door costs to put right turns on which part of the assembly moved and how much has to be carried in to hold it there. Below is what these repairs usually come to on a Richmond address. Your description on the phone sets the figure, and nobody starts work until it has been checked against the actual door.
| Repair | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Door lifted back into square on its hinges | $80 – $150 |
| Strike relocated or upgraded, with the pocket recut | $75 – $140 |
| Closer already fitted, adjusted on the door | $65 – $110 |
| New closer, supplied and installed | $180 – $320 |
| Frame and jamb cut back and rebuilt after a forced entry | $150 – $350 |
| New hinge fitted, each, hardware in the price | $90 – $180 |
| Multi-point locking points brought back into line | $120 – $220 |
| Handle set and latch assembly changed | $160 – $380 |
Those bands cover Richmond houses, townhomes, strata suites and small commercial units. A mortise body in a Steveston heritage door, a Maco or Ferco multi-point at the Terra Nova dyke edge, or a commercial frame on the Westminster Highway strip sits toward the top of a band. Tell us what the door is when you call and the figure tightens up before a van is loaded.
Front entry, the door from the garage into the house, a side or rear entry, a townhome patio door, a gate, a shop's back door. Then the symptom: dragging, not catching, a bolt that stops short, a closer that slams, split wood after somebody tried it overnight. Those two answers sort the job into the frame column or the hardware column, and that is what sets the range.
Strike plates, box strikes, hinges, closers, latch assemblies, handle sets, Weiser and Kwikset cams, jamb stock and long-anchor strikes all ride on the van, so most repairs finish on the first visit. Two things are worth mentioning when you book. If the door carries a European multi-point mechanism, describing it on the phone usually identifies the make and model, and those want different tools than a single-point deadbolt. And out along the Steveston Highway and No. 4 Road corridor in Gilmore, say up front whether the job is only the house, because a repair on one of those larger properties frequently turns out to take in a workshop or a shed door as well.
Nothing gets priced until the cause is known. When the repair is done the door gets worked through everything it has to do while you watch: the slab meeting its stop square, the latch dropping in with nobody leaning on it, the deadbolt running its full travel once the door is shut, a closer easing the last few inches instead of letting the slab fall into the frame. Try it yourself first. Payment comes after that.
Steveston holds the oldest residential doors in the service area, and they are built the other way around from everything newer. On the pre-1960s houses along Moncton Street and the streets running between the village core and the dyke, the lock body is a heavy box set into a pocket cut in the edge of the door rather than a bolt driven through its face. That changes the repair completely. There is no standard deadbolt to drop in when a key shears or the mechanism seizes, and any cylinder has to match the keyway already sitting there. Common mortise replacement cylinders travel on the van, and less common ones can generally be sourced in time for the same visit when the hardware is described at booking.
Those bodies are also rebuildable, which is the part owners are rarely told. A seized or stiff mortise lock of that era normally comes out of the pocket, gets cleaned and lubricated, has its wear parts replaced and goes back in working, without the case being stripped down. Replacement is what a cracked case or a cam worn past service calls for, not age on its own. The frame is usually the other half of the job in this part of Richmond, because these are wooden frames that have settled, and they need adjusting before any new lock will seat properly in them.
Sea Island carries a smaller version of the same problem. The Burkeville bungalows went up from 1948 into the early 1950s, decades ahead of the Schlage and Weiser hardware that covers most of Richmond now. Most have been re-hardwared since, but a back or side entry here and there still runs mortise or rim-latch hardware, and on those the honest answer is a like-for-like repair or a full hardware swap rather than a rekey. Mention any unusual-looking hardware at booking so the van leaves with the right parts aboard.
Almost nothing in West Cambie is old enough to have worn out, so the hardware is rarely the complaint. The patio doors are what people actually call about. Those are multi-point systems: one lift of the handle drives several locking points into the frame at once. When the latch on one starts catching, the cause is nearly always that the door has drifted out of alignment rather than that the mechanism has given up, and it is diagnosed and adjusted on the same visit. A mechanism that genuinely has failed gets quoted separately instead of guessed at.
Terra Nova is where the heavier version turns up. The architecturally distinctive custom builds along the dyke edge run European-style multi-point systems, Maco and Ferco among them, on entry doors rather than only on patio pairs. Those want different service tools than a standard single-point deadbolt, and they can usually be identified by make and model from a description of the door over the phone, which is worth doing before a van is loaded. The rest of Terra Nova is more conventional: Schlage B-series with matched handlesets on the 1990s and early-2000s detached homes, older Emtek and Baldwin on the higher-end ones, and mid-to-late-1990s Schlage and Weiser on the strata townhomes at the south end off Railway Avenue and Granville Avenue.
In the tower stock, the City Centre buildings along Alderbridge Way and Cook Road and the Brighouse high-rises on No. 3 Road between Granville Avenue and Cook Road, the line runs at your own threshold. The hinges, closer, strike, deadbolt and latch on your suite door are ours. Step past it into the lobby, a corridor, the parkade or an amenity room and that door belongs to the strata corporation, and the work is ordered by the council or the property manager rather than by a resident. Building fob and common-area access systems go through the property manager as well.
There is a second permission question, separate from who owns the door. Where a strata restricts what may be fitted to an exterior door, confirm with your council before authorising anything that changes how the door looks from the corridor side. Adjustment work, strike moves, hinge resets and servicing what is already fitted generally avoid the question altogether, and where a change is wanted but the exterior has to stay as it is, a grade-1 deadbolt matching the existing door prep is usually the way through it.
Townhome stratas run differently again. Complexes in Steveston and Hamilton often have a shared exterior gate or complex entry on a key rather than a fob, and that gate cylinder is the strata's even though the door behind it is yours.
On a busy commercial entry the closer is normally the first component to quit. It shows up as a door that no longer eases the last few inches, a slab left standing ajar because the arm has given up returning it, or one that drops shut hard enough to be heard across a shop floor. On the Moncton Street retail, restaurant and professional units in Steveston Village, along the Westminster Highway commercial and light-industrial strip in Hamilton, at the Ironwood Plaza tenants, and on the small strip plazas at the Steveston Highway and No. 4 Road corridor in Gilmore, that is a liability well before it is an inconvenience. Closers, exit devices and panic bars get adjusted, repaired or replaced while the van is there, and the visit can be scheduled off hours so it does not run through a business's own trading time.
Two Richmond specifics are worth flagging on the commercial side. Around the Broadmoor plaza at the Williams Road and No. 4 Road corner, the storefront frames are older than most of the tenancies inside them, and those entry doors have usually had several cylinders through them already, so the prep gets measured before a handle set or deadbolt is ordered for one. Ironwood Plaza splits the other way: the retail entries run keyed knobs and lever sets while the backroom and office doors behind them run standard commercial deadbolts, so one unit can need two unrelated repairs on a single call.
Bridgeport is where a commercial door call can land in the middle of the night, because the casino resort, the hotels along River Road and Bridgeport Road and the office and light-industrial buildings around them do not all keep shop hours. On hotel property the boundary is firm and worth stating up front. Anything running on a guest-room card reader stays with the hotel's own maintenance people. Doors on a key rather than a card are a different matter, and there are more of them behind a hotel than most guests ever see: the corridors staff move through, plant and storage rooms, back offices, and the entries onto the street.
The door, not the lock. The bolt is now arriving a few millimetres from where the strike pocket sits, because the frame has settled or the slab has taken on damp. Moving the strike, deepening its mortise, or resetting the hinges to lift the door back into the opening puts it right, and none of that involves buying hardware. Fit a new deadbolt to a frame in that condition and you own a new deadbolt that also will not seat.
Yes, and it is a different fix from a door that has permanently dropped. Wood-frame townhomes in Hamilton, and the older homes nearest the water in Steveston, take on damp through the wet months and give it back in summer, so the repair has to leave room for the swollen state without leaving the latch loose in the dry one. That usually means the strike and the hinges do the work and the plane stays in the van. Frames that have genuinely settled, which is what the older Thompson and Seafair stock has done, are the ones where taking material off the edge is the right call.
The frame, in all but a handful of cases. The jamb splits alongside the strike while the deadbolt itself comes through undamaged, and screwing a lock back into wood that has already failed buys nothing at all. The broken length gets cut out and replaced, a reinforced strike goes back in, and the fixings run past the trim into the structure behind it, which is the part that decides whether the door holds next time. If a key went missing at the same time, the cylinder can be rekeyed or replaced on the same visit. Strata townhome complexes in Ironwood see a lock damaged in a break-in attempt from time to time, and that is the same call.
Yes, on the hardware and the locking mechanism. That covers multi-point adjustment, handle and latch sets, and the alignment work that is usually the real cause when a multi-point latch starts catching on a newer West Cambie townhome. Where the mechanism itself has failed rather than drifted, that is priced separately, and some of it runs past what one mobile visit can finish.
A strike adjustment or a light plane is often a twenty-minute fix on its own. A full alignment job, with the hinges coming off and going back on longer fixings, runs 30 to 60 minutes. Jamb repair after a forced entry, a closer replacement, or multi-point work is typically 60 to 90 minutes. You get a time estimate on the call and it is confirmed once the door has been looked at.
For your own suite door, yes. Anything on the far side of that threshold is the corporation's, so a resident cannot order it. Authorising that work, and paying for it, both sit with the strata council or whoever manages the building. Point us at them and they get quoted directly. The other thing worth checking first is whether your building limits what can be fitted to an exterior door, though repairing or adjusting hardware that is already on it rarely runs into that.
Yes, and on a Richmond detached property it is one of the more common calls. That door and the one connecting the garage to the house both sit on ordinary hinges and an ordinary strike, so they get the same repair as a front entry. While we are there it is worth asking what keys open them, because on the Broadmoor and Seafair stock the front deadbolt, the garage and the gate have often been replaced in different decades and no longer share a keyway. Sorting that out is separate work from the repair, but it is cheaper done on the same visit than as a second one.
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