Burnaby hands us two kinds of door. In the towers at Metrotown, Brentwood and Lougheed it is a suite door that has dropped out of square after a few thousand closings. On the hillsides it is a house that settled a few millimetres a decade until the bolt stopped finding its pocket. Fast Locksmith Burnaby repairs both, same day, mobile, at a price agreed before anything comes off the door.
A dragging suite door on a Brentwood twelfth floor and a sagging garage man-door on a Government Road lot are the same trade and two completely different visits.
Doors here fail for reasons you can read off a map. Burnaby is a ridge with towers parked on the transit nodes and detached houses on nearly everything that slopes. On the slopes it happens slowly: foundation movement under the post-war houses of Burnaby Heights, ground settling on Capitol Hill, soil settlement beneath the oldest Edmonds blocks, hillside shift on the South Slope and Buckingham Heights, decades of it along Government Road. Nobody notices a door going out of square. They notice the morning they have to lift the handle to get the bolt in.
In the tower stock the same thing happens far faster. A suite door in a Metrotown high-rise or one of the newer Willingdon and Beta Avenue buildings is a heavy self-closing slab on three hinges, shutting a few thousand times a year against its own closer. Hinges sag, the closer loses tension, the strike stops catching.
One thing to settle if you are calling from a strata building: we work from the suite door inward, and anything the building access control contractor installed stays with them. Your hinges, closer, strike, deadbolt and the patio slider behind them are ours to fix, and they matter, because a bolt throwing half its length removes most of the resistance the door was sold with. A door that has dropped on its hinges is the usual reason a bolt stops reaching, which is why we measure the gap at the strike before anyone starts talking about a new lock.
What it costs depends on which of those the door needs, and whether the part is on the truck. You get a firm number before the work starts.
| Service | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Door alignment & hinge adjustment | $80 – $150 |
| Strike plate reposition or upgrade | $75 – $140 |
| Closer adjustment (existing unit) | $65 – $110 |
| Closer replacement (supply & fit) | $180 – $320 |
| Frame & jamb repair (break-in damage) | $150 – $350 |
| Hinge replacement (per hinge, hardware included) | $90 – $180 |
| Multi-point lock mechanism adjustment | $120 – $220 |
| Full hardware replacement (handle set, latches) | $160 – $380 |
Pre-war mortise doors in the Heights, heavy steel frames on the Big Bend warehouses and multi-point patio systems sit at the top of each range.
Sticking, not latching, slamming, dragging on the carpet, or split at the jamb after somebody forced it. Two or three questions usually pin it down, and you get a range on that call.
For a tower in Brentwood or Metrotown, give us the street address, the suite number and the visitor parking level, because the stall level decides which elevator bank the tech takes. If the elevators are on controlled access, have a building contact available and that time goes in the quote. On Capitol Hill's upper streets we navigate by street number and ask about side gates and laneway entries.
We find what moved before we price the fix. Then the door runs its full cycle: latch engagement, bolt throw, closer sweep and latch speed. You try it before we take payment.
The Heights is the clearest case. Houses off Pender Street, along Ingleton Avenue and through the grid running south toward Willingdon are largely 1920s to 1960s, and the pre-1950s ones went up before door hardware was standardised. A modern handle set does not drop into a mortise pocket cut for a lock body nobody has made in decades, and boring a 2-1/8 inch hole into a pre-war prep leaves a weaker door than you started with. We repair the original, find period compatible hardware, or say plainly that the slab is finished.
Capitol Hill, Buckingham Heights, the South Slope and Government Road move more slowly, on bigger houses with five or more ways in: front, back or side, a garage man-door, often a suite entrance. One door drags in February while the one beside it is fine, so we look over every exterior door while the van is there. Around Stride Avenue near the New Westminster border much of the oldest housing has been converted to rental suites, and under BC's Residential Tenancy Act a tenant needs landlord consent to change or add a lock, though a repair is a different question. On Burnaby Mountain the weather does the work instead, and doors in the UniverCity stratas and the rented houses off Gaglardi Way swell and sag faster than their equivalents below.
The Hastings Street village strip is independent retail, cafés and restaurants in older multi-unit buildings, where the storefront door never gets a day off, so we book that work outside trading hours. Highgate Village on Kingsway brings the same jobs on newer aluminium frames. At the foot of the South Slope, the Big Bend warehouses and the light industrial strip along Brunette Avenue run heavier hardware: overhead closers on steel doors and panic bars that no longer pull the latch clear. The Deer Lake arts buildings, the Shadbolt Centre among them, are the opposite problem: old, protected, and not candidates for replacement.
Property managers can batch several doors into one visit and one call-out. Under roughly 30 units that is usually walked, quoted and finished the same day.
Usually not. A bolt that only seats when you lift or lean on the door is nearly always the latch or the strike rather than the cylinder, and a few millimetres of frame movement will do it. We measure the offset, then move the strike, deepen the pocket, or bring the door back to square at the hinges.
Under most bylaws the suite door hardware and its operation belong to the owner or the tenant, and common property doors belong to the strata. Our line is simpler: from your door inward is ours, while the lobby, parkade gate, fob readers and intercom sit with the strata's access control contractor.
The work runs 30 to 60 minutes for an alignment or a strike relocation, and 60 to 90 for a closer replacement, a multi-point patio mechanism or a rebuilt jamb. Arrival depends on where the nearest technician is, and we give you the window on the call. Capitol Hill takes longer for the climb and the narrow upper streets, and SFU and UniverCity longer again, since Gaglardi Way is effectively the only road up.
No. North Road is the boundary and we work the Burnaby side of it: the towers on Walker and Donald Avenue, the townhome clusters south toward Gauthier Avenue, and the older rental stock west toward Kensington Avenue. Read us the address and we will confirm which municipality you are in.
Every part of the city has its own housing stock and its own access notes. Tap yours for the local detail.
A door repair often turns into a rekey, a hardware upgrade or a new deadbolt. All of it rides on the same truck.