Locksmith Services in Lakeview, Mississauga

Lakeview is one of the oldest suburban parts of Mississauga, built out largely in the 1940s and 1950s for workers at the industries along the lake. The result is street after street of solid, modest, well built bungalows on generous lots.

These houses share a hardware profile so consistent it is almost diagnostic. A solid wood front door that is better than anything currently sold, a frame of old growth softwood, and a lock and strike that were adequate in 1952. The strike plate is typically held by two screws about three quarters of an inch long, into trim rather than into the structural framing behind it.

That is the weak point, and it is the cheapest thing on the house to fix. A reinforced strike anchored with three inch screws through the jamb and into the stud transforms how much force the door will take, and it costs less than the deadbolt does. On a Lakeview bungalow it is the single change worth making before any other.

The lots in Lakeview are deeper than in newer subdivisions, and a great many of them back onto ravines, the creek corridor, the golf course, or a laneway. That is a large part of the neighbourhood's appeal and it is also a security consideration that gets overlooked.

A back door that opens onto a deep, treed, unlit rear yard is not a low risk door because it is at the back. It is the opposite: it offers privacy and time, which is exactly what someone forcing a door wants. Yet it very often has older or lighter hardware than the front.

The same applies to side doors and to the door from an attached garage or a rear addition. Anything that opens to the outside should be treated as an entry door, with a deadbolt and a reinforced strike, regardless of which direction it faces.

Lakeview is under significant redevelopment. The former generating station lands are becoming a large new waterfront community, and across the older streets there is steady infill: original bungalows being renovated substantially or replaced with larger houses.

That produces two distinct kinds of call. Renovation handovers, where a homeowner is finally getting the property back after months of trades holding a construction key, and the correct move is a rekey the week the last contractor leaves. And new build handovers, where the builder, the trades and the sales office have all had keys.

In both cases rekeying rather than replacing is normally the right answer, because the hardware on a newly finished house is new. What needs retiring is the key population, not the locks.