House Lockout in Palo Alto

Most house lockouts in Palo Alto begin with a door that did its job a little too well. The atrium gate of a Greenmeadow Eichler closes on its spring while the ring sits on the kitchen counter behind the glass. A Professorville front door hung around 1912 latches for the first time in years and the mortise lock decides to hold. A side gate in Old Palo Alto locks from the garden side after the housekeeper who carries the key has gone home. A College Terrace rental at eleven at night, the roommate away and the landlord in another state. Tall Tree Lock & Safe opens those doors at any hour. Calls are answered 24/7, the figure is said on the call, and a text naming the technician and the window reaches your phone as the van leaves Midtown.

The lock deserves a locksmith, not a drill, and that is where every one of these jobs starts. In Greenmeadow, Fairmeadow and Green Gables the door is an Eichler door: a flat slab with the deadbolt the builder chose, or a sliding panel on a hook latch, and a pick or a shim has either open in a few minutes. The mortise locks in Professorville and Old Palo Alto are older than anyone who has turned them, so they are picked slowly, with the brass plug coming through unmarked and staying in the door. A Crescent Park house often adds a hedge, a gate and a detached garage, and the technician waits at the gate to be let through rather than going over it. Apartment buildings near the Caltrain station have a street door that belongs to everyone, so that one is left alone and you come down to meet the van. On the step, before anything else, the address on your identification, or on a lease and a piece of mail shown on your phone, is matched to the number on the door. On the rare door where the lock leaves no other way in, drilling is explained, you decide, and the figure stays where it was.

House lockouts run from $129 to $219. In daylight, a single deadbolt on a ground-floor door is $129, and the $89 service call is already inside that number rather than a line under it. The figure climbs toward $219 when there is a second locked door behind the first, a high-security cylinder, or a keypad deadbolt whose battery died with the key inside. Between 8pm and midnight the same $129 door is said as $184; between midnight and 7am it is said as $219. Nothing is added for the tool used, the neighborhood or the hour beyond those two additions, and they are said on the call, not discovered on the step.

You call and describe the door: which lock is on it, how old the house is, whether the key is inside, whether a gate stands in front. The figure is said on the call from that description. The van leaves Midtown, and a text names the technician and the window, fourteen to twenty-five minutes across the city and longer up in Palo Alto Hills. The door is opened without drilling wherever the lock allows, you throw the bolt yourself a few times to feel that nothing has changed, card or tap is taken at the door, and the receipt repeats the figure by email before the van is out of the driveway.