Richmond runs from the 1948 airport-worker bungalows in Burkeville to the post-2010 towers on Hollybridge Way, and the ten services below cover the whole of that span. A licensed technician gives you the range on the phone before a van leaves, so the figure is settled before anyone is dispatched and no surprise fee lands on the invoice at the end.
What the ten headings actually mean at a Richmond address, and the three places our scope stops.
Two things make the hardware behind a Richmond door hard to guess at from the kerb. The first is age. Burkeville's wood-frame bungalows went up for airport staff between 1948 and the early 1950s, decades ahead of the Schlage and Weiser that most of the city now turns on, while the Capstan and Alexandra blocks in West Cambie are almost entirely post-2010 and arrive with keypad deadbolts already fitted by the developer. The second is how many times a cylinder has been turned over. A tower suite on Alderbridge Way or Cook Road may have passed through a long run of tenancies, and once the key feels sticky or the plug drags as it rotates, that cylinder has reached the end of its life rather than earned another set of pins. Between those poles sit Steveston's pre-1960s mortise bodies, the 1960s to 1990s detached stock in Broadmoor and Thompson, and the multi-point European systems on the custom builds along the Terra Nova dyke edge. The vans carry blanks, cylinders, cams and programming gear for all of it.
Where our work stops is worth settling up front, and in Richmond it stops in three places. In the tower stock you can be locked out at two points, the building entrance and your own deadbolt, and only the second of those is ours: everything from the suite door inward. Anything to do with the building's fob system goes through the property manager. In the Bridgeport hotels the split runs the other way round, because guest-room card systems are maintained in-house while every conventionally keyed door in the place, service corridors, storage rooms, offices and exterior entries, is work we take. And a motorised garage opener with the remote shut inside is a garage-door call rather than a locksmith one, though the keyed pedestrian door beside it and the garage-to-house door are both ours.
Getting to you is the simplest part of the job here. Richmond is a flat delta laid out on a numbered grid between the Fraser's two arms, so there are no switchback climbs to allow for and nothing to wait for at a ferry ramp. Two destinations break the pattern. Sea Island is reached over the Arthur Laing Bridge from the north or the Moray Bridge connector from east Richmond, and parts of the airport property are controlled access, so say so on the call and the access is sorted before anyone is dispatched. Hamilton sits out past No. 8 Road on Westminster Highway near the Queensborough boundary. A single Richmond-wide figure is an average across the city rather than a window for your street. The fourteen area pages each set out a window of their own, and the one covering your address is the figure to work from.
Ten headings, fourteen service areas, one number. Licensed BC locksmiths throughout, and nobody else sent in our place.
Forced doors, a blade snapped off in the cylinder, a set of keys gone entirely. Bridgeport keeps hotel and casino floors running through the night, so a commercial lockout at three in the morning is ordinary there rather than exceptional, and whatever the job costs at that hour is quoted on the phone before a van is dispatched.
Getting you back inside, then dealing with the keys still in circulation afterwards. A rekey at possession cuts out the previous owner, every past tenant, the trades who worked on the place, the agent and the lockbox, and on a single-family house the whole exterior set is done in one visit.
Retail units, office suites, warehouses, and the shared doors a strata is answerable for. Common profiles are stocked and cut; on a restricted or proprietary system the honest answer is a cylinder replacement rather than a guessed blank. Schlage C and SC1 ride on the van for same-day work.
Lockouts, broken-key extraction, ignition cylinders, and fobs that have stopped talking to the car. Most of these calls come out of a parkade, so have the level, the vehicle's colour and make, and any number or letter on the nearest pillar ready.
Blades cut and transponders programmed at the kerb, because the chip has to be accepted by the car's ECU before the engine will turn over. Keys go missing differently around the airport: on the plane, in the hotel room, in the rental cubby, then noticed in a YVR parking structure after a week away with a flat fob battery. Flying back in, you can book against your arrival time plus a buffer for customs and bags.
The detached half of the city usually wants one key rather than three. Seafair is the clearest case: in many of those houses the deadbolts have been replaced once or twice since the home was built while the original knob sets sometimes remain on the secondary doors, so the front entry, the garage pedestrian door and the side gate can each end up carrying a key of their own. Where the keyways do not match, say a Schlage front door against a Kwikset garage deadbolt, the odd one out is swapped so the whole set takes the same key.
Battery keypads and app-connected deadbolts, ordered for you and fitted. In West Cambie a good number of units already came with one from the developer. Elsewhere the decision belongs to the strata, so check with your council first; a battery keypad that needs no change to the door itself is the easiest case to get through. And a Kwikset SmartKey cylinder that has been reset too often will sometimes refuse a new key altogether, in which case a standard high-security core goes into the same door prep.
Often the lock is innocent. A bolt that throws freely with the door open and binds the moment it is shut is a frame that has settled or swollen, which is the Hamilton townhomes in a wet stretch and the 1960s and 1970s frames in Thompson and Seafair after decades of movement. Shifting the strike, deepening its mortise or planing the door edge is generally a twenty-minute fix. On the newer West Cambie patio doors, a multi-point latch that catches is an alignment question too.
Opening one when the combination has gone or the bolt has jammed, resetting a combination that still works, bolting down a new safe and moving an existing one. On the commercial side that is mostly office safes in the Bridgeport and No. 3 Road buildings. Say the make and roughly the size when you call, so the right tooling is already on the van when it leaves.
A keying matrix drawn up from a door count and a map of who should reach what, then pinned and installed, on a restricted keyway where copying has to be authorised. Along Bridgeport Road and the streets off No. 2 Road, most of this work is rekeying inside a master system that already exists, after a departure or a lease changeover, on Schlage, Medeco or Mul-T-Lock. Bring the master key to the appointment and expect to be asked to confirm you are an authorised party first. The multi-entry warehouses off Viking Way in East Cambie are the other steady source.
Fourteen areas, each with a page of its own: the roads we route in on, the hardware that dominates there, and the arrival window for that corner of the city.