A lot of Burnaby has no private garage at all. Park under a tower off Kingsway or Willingdon and the ramp gate belongs to the building, so our work there stops at your storage cage. Elsewhere, behind the Heights and out along Government Road, there is a real garage door and it is usually the softest way into the house. We fit and rekey garage door locks on that door: man-door deadbolts, T-handles, cane bolts and keypad entries, cut to the key you already carry.
A garage is only as strong as its weakest opening, and that is almost never the big overhead panel. It is the walk-in door beside it, or the connecting door into the kitchen, and on plenty of Burnaby houses one of those still has a passage knob and nothing more.
First question on the phone is which kind of garage you have, because in Burnaby that decides whether there is a job at all. In a tower at Metrotown, Brentwood or the Lougheed hub, the ramp gate, the fob reader and the rolling door belong to the building's access-control contractor. The cylinder on your storage cage is yours. On a house, a laneway build or a townhouse with its own garage, the whole lot is ours: overhead handle, side door, connecting door and the keying between them.
| Garage lock job | Range |
|---|---|
| Cane bolt or inside slide lock, supplied and fitted | $40–$90 |
| Rekeying a garage entry cylinder onto your house key | $30–$80 |
| Keyed T-handle for a tilt-up or older sectional door | $60–$140 |
| Deadbolt fitted to a garage walk-in door | $90–$180 |
| Deadbolt on the garage-to-house connecting door | $90–$170 |
| Keypad or app deadbolt on a garage man-door | $180–$400 |
Those take in the part, the labour and the call. They climb with a metal-clad door, a jamb that needs rebuilding before a strike will hold, or a restricted keyway that cannot be cut on the van. Townhouse owners should expect two or three cylinders in the quote, because keying two of the three solves nothing.
Tilt-up, sectional, townhouse man-door or a detached garage off the lane? A photo of the handle helps, and the brand stamped on the cylinder face tells us more than the door does.
Street address, not a landmark. Capitol Hill's upper streets are narrow and steep, Government Road driveways run long, and near the Lougheed hub we confirm you are west of North Road first. The arrival window comes on the call. Capitol Hill takes longer, and the mountain longer again because Gaglardi Way is the only road up.
Keys are cut in the van, the new cylinder goes onto your existing house key where the keyway allows, and we test the bolt against the strike before leaving.
North Burnaby's older grids are where this work concentrates. The Heights is a 1920s to 1960s belt of detached houses whose garage sits off the lane behind the lot, and the man-door usually still carries its original knob with a screwed-on hasp beside it. That is a padlock's worth of security over a room of tools and a second way into the house. In Willingdon Heights, where 1940s bungalows keep giving way to infill and laneway houses, the garage is handed over on the same builder's key every trade on site carried for months. On Capitol Hill the garage often sits behind a gate, so say so on the call.
Ramp gates, parkade doors, fob readers and intercom panels are building-wide access control, which is the property manager's contractor and not us. Your storage cage is a different matter, and a tired locker cylinder is a two-minute swap while we are in the building anyway. Townhouses are the exception that matters: a tandem garage with a man-door into the unit is private hardware, and through the Lougheed strata clusters, the complexes behind Kingsway at Highgate, the 1980s and 1990s rows in Cariboo and the larger complexes near Marine Drive on the South Slope we usually key two or three cylinders per unit in one visit. Where a master system already exists, we confirm the hierarchy first.
Key-alike is simple until the two ends of the property come from different decades. Stock built before roughly 2005 leans on the Kwikset KW1 keyway, while newer buildings along the Brentwood and Lougheed corridors more often use Schlage SC1 or a restricted profile the developer chose. Older houses run Weiser, and on the larger lots around Deer Lake, Buckingham Heights and Government Road we still pull Weslock and Arrow cylinders out of 1970s and 1980s doors. An off-the-shelf T-handle comes in KW1 or SC1 and nothing else, so when the house sits on a forty-year-old Weslock one end has to move. Both keyways ride in the van.
Plenty of garage calls are not lock calls. A detached garage is unheated, so its door and jamb move through the year far more than the heated house door does, and the ground has been shifting under both for decades: soft soil in older Edmonds, downhill creep on the South Slope, plain age on the Government Road and Buckingham Heights lots. If the key turns fine but the bolt will not seat, that is alignment and moving the strike fixes it. If the key only turns at one exact lift angle, or the plug has play in the face, the cylinder is worn past what pinning can fix, because fresh pins do not repair worn spring seating. That is a replacement, not another rekey. Frames gone out of square are door repair.
Every area below, from the lane garages in the north to the townhome complexes above Marine Drive. The Lougheed end stops at North Road: the Burnaby side is ours, a lane garage a block east of it is Coquitlam’s, and we sort that out on the phone rather than at your door.
A garage side door is usually the one cylinder on a Burnaby property keyed to nothing else, which is how its spare ends up in a drawer nobody can find. These are the jobs most often booked onto the same visit.