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As we’ve all seen, it’s increasingly popular to replace traditional key-operated locks with electronic keypad locks. When doing so, it’s generally best to make the keyless lock the only piece of locking hardware on the door. Otherwise it is almost inevitable that at some point the other hardware will get locked and someone who does not expect to need a key will be locked out. A challenge arises when a customer wants to have keyless entry on a door that has a mortise lock.

This is not usually a simple lock swap. As it stands, the keyless options for mortise locks are mostly aimed at commercial users. They lack the affordability and user friendliness of the locks commonly offered for residential applications, and they’re not front-door pretty. But the residential keypad locks we get from the big retailers require a door preparation that is completely different from that of mortise locks. Replacing an expensive and sometimes very old mortise lock with a tubular lock entails covering or filling old holes in the door and making new ones. There are different ways of doing this, which range from labor-intensive to unattractive. It’s tempting to leave the mortise lock as it is and just add a residential keyless deadbolt higher on the door, but mortise locks are notorious for causing lockouts even when people are accustomed to using keys, so this is not a good solution.

The least hardware- and labor-intensive solution (read: quickest and cheapest) is often to modify the existing mortise lock so that it only functions as a passage handle, and then install the new keypad deadbolt above it. That’s what I did to the door in the accompanying photo. It is a commercial-style door that the customer wanted to use a specific residential keypad on.  I opened up the mortise lock body, which looks like a steampunk Rube Goldberg project inside, and plucked out a bunch of the parts that make it lock. The faceplate was left with two empty spaces where locking elements used to be, and the keyed cylinder is no longer functional. For a more finished look we could have replaced the faceplate with one that didn’t have those holes and replaced the cylinder with a dummy, but the customer deemed it unnecessary.

It’s possible that this post will be a curious internet fossil within a couple of years, as lock manufacturers are rapidly putting out new products to meet the growing demand for keyless entry. Until then, my advice, when practical, will be to leave your beautiful front door as it is and put the keypad lock on the mudroom door, which rarely has a mortise lock on it.

A great deal of my time as a locksmith is spent rekeying people’s locks so that existing keys will no longer allow access to their homes and businesses. Usually when moving into a new space it’s wise to rekey all the locks. Sometimes we take that measure but later lose faith in someone that we ourselves have given a key to. Here are a few situations I’ve encountered where rekeying was clearly the right course of action:

-A landlord called me up requesting an urgent rekey of his rental property on Mercer Island. His tenant had been taking a nap on her sofa when an unfamiliar young man walked in, announcing to the house that he was home. He had been backpacking in Europe and while he was gone his family moved without telling him. His key still worked, though.

-A woman in Newcastle left her dog in the care of a female house sitter while she went on vacation. She had cameras set up in her house so she could watch her dog throughout the workday, and the house sitter turned them to face the walls. She reasoned that someone staying in a hotel room wouldn’t want to be subject to video monitoring, and so she shrugged it off. What she did not shrug off was when she came home a day early and walked through her master bedroom only to find an unknown man taking a bubble bath in her tub. The married house sitter had been using the gig as an opportunity to meet with a paramour, and left him in the house while she went to work.

-A widow in North Seattle came home from the grocery store and found her next-door neighbor standing in her bedroom. When she asked him what he was doing and how he got in, he explained that he still had the key from when the previous owner lived there, and that he’d come in because he was “just curious.” In addition to this being outrageously inappropriate, it was also rather unfortunate because the woman had been good friends with him and his wife, and this incident would be hard to get past.

I don’t even like it when unexpected visitors knock on my front door, so I can’t imagine how unhappy I would be if I found one on the other side of that sacred barrier. Thinking back on these incidents, I almost want to rekey my own house just for good measure.

One of my pet peeves is when customers use the word mechanism. I’ve only ever heard it over the phone and in the following context:

Me: What’s wrong with your lock?

Customer: There’s a problem with the mechanism.

Not only is this word only ever used with me in this way, but it’s also only ever used by male customers. And it’s only ever spoken with an unironic air of confidence and expertise. In case you’re not aware, the word mechanism, in this context, is a highfalutin synonym of whatchamajigger. It’s completely meaningless and it does not convey a single iota of knowledge or understanding about locks and how they work.

It occurred to me recently that I hadn’t heard the word in a long time. I started wondering why that was. Did this have something to do with shifting trends in the lexicography of male overconfidence? I pondered this for a while. It wasn’t until after a phone call with a customer that I realized what it was. Instead of asking:

What’s wrong with your lock?

I instead asked:

What’s your lock doing?

I don’t remember if it was a conscious decision to stop asking the first question and start asking the second, but the subtle change has benefitted me and my customers. The first question was an unreasonable one, which demanded too much of the customer. It asked for diagnosis. It’s my job to provide that, not the customer’s. The other question asks for symptoms. That doesn’t require any kind reasoning or hypothesizing about why the lock is malfunctioning. Indeed, the question discourages the kind of unsupported diagnostic description that might set me down the wrong path in my effort to visualize the problem.

So all along it was my bad wording of the question that was inviting a response that annoyed me so much. I’m glad that I, consciously or not, corrected that. As I continue to run my little business there’s a constant drift toward greater efficiency, both in how I perform the physical work and in how I communicate with my customers. Next I have to figure out a way to get my customers to stop telling me about their tumblers. I never have managed to figure out what those are. I suppose they may be a part of the mechanism.

I received an interesting call from a customer in Bothell. She told me that her neighbor had entrusted her with the task of watering his house plants when he went for an extended trip to his home in India. But there was something wrong with the lock because the key he gave her wasn’t working right. It broke off in the lock when she tried to use it. Now she couldn’t get in and the plants were in peril. Could I let her into the house?

“It sounds like you didn’t have the key for your neighbor’s house,” I told her.

“No, no,” she assured me. “It was his house key. He gave it to me.”

“Did you ever successfully use the key to get in?”

“Well…no. But it was my neighbor’s house key. I’m sure of it.”

Realizing that this discussion was not going to be productive, I explained the steps she would have to take. This is a discussion that I’ve had with countless housesitters and petsitters in the past. Because it’s not your house, I can’t just let you into It, I told her. I would need to feel very secure that the owner of the house has given approval to let me let you into the house. What I’d like to see is a photo of your neighbor holding his ID, along with a note from the same source giving me permission to gain entry to the house. I would then check the neighbor’s name against public records. Once I had all of that I could do this job.

“Okay, but it’s middle of the night in India. I don’t want to wake him up.”

“This will have to wait until tomorrow, then.“

“What if I just show you my ID and prove that I’m the neighbor? Then will you let me in?”

I explained why that would not be sufficient. I reiterated my request for the owner to send a picture of himself holding his license. In reality, I believed her. It would be very audacious to hire a locksmith to help her commit a burglary. But I enjoy my livelihood and my freedom, so I’m not leaving any room for doubt, and especially not over some house plants. So I left her to decide whether she wanted to meet my conditions are start looking for a less punctilious locksmith.

The next morning I awoke to an email in my inbox. It contained the note I had asked for and two photos. One was of a driver’s license bearing the address in question, and the other was of the subject of that ID. If you’ve been reading carefully, you already know that this is not quite what I asked for; the owner and ID were not in the same photo. What’s more, the name on the ID was not the same as the name in the email address. I looked closely at the owner’s photo and noticed that the home the person was standing in looked very much like one of the newer houses that I frequently visit in Bothell. So I checked the photo’s metadata, and sure enough, it had been taken three months prior. This raised more concerns than it settled. It’s like if I’d asked someone from a dating app to send me a picture of herself holding up three fingers to make sure she wasn’t catfishing me, and she sent me a photo of herself in front of Epcot holding up the peace sign.

It didn’t work for me, so I had to get back to the neighbor with the bad news. She didn’t take it well.

“Aw, come on,” she cajoled. “I gave you almost everything you asked for. Can’t you just make an exception for me?”

“I’m sorry. No. It looks like we’ll just have to wait another day to get the right documents from your neighbor.”

“Listen,” she said. “It’s very important that I get into that house. My neighbor has trusted me to take care of his plants. And inside he has a HOLY BASIL. This is an extremely important plant in our religion and it is very delicate. I must water it.”

Now, I’ve let people into houses in a hurry for all kinds of reasons. Once a lady was trying to get to a job interview on time. One time a young woman desperately needed to get to her medication. More than once a locked door has separated a caregiver from a small child. But this horticultural emergency is the strangest and least compelling reason I have heard to break protocol and risk helping a stranger commit a crime. As desperate as this customer was, and as much as I like playing the hero, the holy basil didn’t move me.

So we waited another day for the owner to send what I asked for. In the end I opened the door, confirmed that the broken-off key had nothing to do with the lock that it was lodged in, and made a working key. I assume the basil was fine.

As an epilogue to this story, I should say that later in the same day I was in the home of another Indian customer, recounting this story with some curiosity as I worked on her lock. She went off into another room and came back with a leaf, which she handed to me. It was, indeed, the leaf of a holy basil plant. I wasn’t sure if I should put it in my mouth, but she encouraged me to try it. I would say that it tasted like a cross between mint, basil, and clove. She confirmed that it serves an important religious function and explained to me that it is a very delicate plant that is hard to grow in this climate, and that it is particularly sensitive to overwatering.

A couple of weeks ago I was scheduled to help with an eviction. The job was indefinitely postponed because earlier in the week a Sheriff’s deputy sustained a serious gunshot wound while executing an eviction in Ballard. The resident died by her own hand in that incident.

Evictions are among my least favorite parts of this job. It often starts with me crouching at a door with a cluster of policemen standing behind me waiting for me to quietly pick the lock. The pressure of this does not make me a more efficient lockpicker. And these days, as I fumble with the lock, it’s almost inevitable that someone behind me will mention The Lockpicking Lawyer, that talented YouTube star whose hobby lockpicking videos make me look like a silly amateur. On one occasion I spent about ten nervous minutes picking a lock and as soon as I got it open and turned around to face the waiting officers I heard the deadbolt snap shut behind me; the resident inside had been standing on the other side of the door.

In most cases, once I get the door open, I’m politely brushed to the side as the police stream into the house. As soon as it’s considered safe for me enter, I have to go in and secure the house. Sometimes the evictees are miserably gathering up their most treasured possessions before everything is removed from the house. I’ve never been into a well-kept eviction home. They usually smell nauseating. They’re always in shambles. Once I had to wade through a room that was piled chest-high with empty beer cans. There’s often a carpeted room that the residents have been letting their dogs deposit their waste in. Sometimes the human residents have used the carpet for the same purpose to spite the landlord.

A few years ago I had to do an eviction around the time of all the Defund-the-Police protests. This was a second attempt at evicting a resident who’d recently experienced a parade of devastating setbacks. On the first eviction attempt he had flashed a gun and the operation was terminated. So on this attempt the eviction team congregated several blocks away at a public park. I would estimate that there were no fewer than thirty law enforcement officers there from various departments, including SWAT. The guy leading the operation gathered everyone into a circle and told them what to expect. One thing I remember clearly was him exhorting them to exercise restraint if the resident had to be subdued; he didn’t want any more officers than necessary to get involved if a physical altercation transpired. It was only a month after the murder of George Floyd and he was afraid of cell phone footage appearing on YouTube showing a down-and-out tenant at the bottom of an unholy dogpile of Seattle policemen.

I, along with the other civilians present, were told to wait there in the park until the property was cleared, and then they all got in their vehicles and the entire caravan snaked out of the parking lot and down the road to ascend upon the house. By the time I got there, the house had been swept for residents and explosives and there was no longer a door frame to hold the door shut. I did what I could to install a padlock and hasp on the door as the team of junk removers carted furniture and household items through the door I was working on. I was in their way and they in mine. The padlock didn’t prevent the resident from re-entering that same night, but it did serve its other intended purpose, which was to necessitate that the evicted resident forcibly breach a locked door to get in.

So as I was saying, I don’t like doing evictions. They’re stressful and the houses are usually gross. And they always represent a terrible moment in the life of the tenant, which I’m somehow contributing to. This is not to say that landlords aren’t entitled to—often financially dependent upon—the rent that they’re owed. But gosh if I don’t prefer to be changing the locks for a happy young couple who have just gotten the keys to their first home.

One of the blessings that comes of having these confounded devices on our persons at all times is that it’s really easy to take and share photos. This is so handy when it comes to getting work done at your home or office. It used to be necessary for a specialty contractor to show up to a job almost completely blind. He’d hope to have what he needed to complete the project, but lots of times he wouldn’t, and it would result in a return trip. Sometimes the first trip would be presented as a free estimate. But let’s be real; one way or another, the cost of those visits would be worked into the price and passed onto you, the customer.

Now that it’s so easy to provide photos ahead of a job that needs doing, many of these wasted trips can be averted. But sometimes I ask customers to send me photos and I get the sense that they resent the request. Maybe they’ll send one terrible photo that isn’t what I asked for, or even question why I need photos when they’ve already given me a perfectly good explanation of the issue. Sometimes I have to ask a few times for reasonably helpful photos and end up turning the work away because I get tired of the back and forth. Customers don’t always realize that the ultimate purpose of providing good photos is to save them time and money by enabling us to work more efficiently.

When I receive unhelpful photos, it’s not always that the customer is doing a willfully bad job of taking pictures. I have come to understand that photography is a form of communication and taking bad photos is often accompanied by an inability to offer clear descriptions and explanations. Some people just have a really hard time putting themselves in another’s shoes and imagining how information will be received and processed, whether it be presented verbally or visually.

So I’ve been trying to come up with some tips on providing helpful photos to contractors. Some are more basic than others.

Occasionally a person will call me and immediately say something like, “Hey, how much to fix my latch?” I have no idea what they’re talking about and it takes me many questions to get on the same page as them. It’s so much easier for me if someone calls up and says something like this: “I have a business in downtown Bellevue. The main door is glass with a metal frame. The lock isn’t working. Can you help me?” Armed with that information, which goes from general and contextual to more specific, I’m on track to start asking the right questions to zero in on the specific problem.

With photos, the strategy should be the same. If possible, provide a photo from space. Then provide a photo of the general work site, and then one of the specific thing to be worked on. One time a customer sent me an extreme close-up of a deadbolt that wasn’t working right. I couldn’t diagnose the problem over the phone but as soon as I pulled into the driveway I could see that the Christmas wreath hanging from the top of the door was probably preventing it from closing all the way, thus interfering with the alignment of the lock. The solution was to hang the wreath from a nail instead. I might well have diagnosed that from afar if I’d had a photo of the whole door.

Taking and sending photos is free, so don’t be stingy. Assume that you don’t know everything the expert needs to see. Don’t censor the photos based on your impression of the problem. Take photos from different angles. And show the service provider more than you think he needs to see. Don’t limit the photos to close-ups. Trust that if you pan out and take good high-resolution photos, the service provider will know how to zoom in on them. If he only receives close-ups, he won’t be able to zoom out to see what lies beyond the edges of your photos.

And try not to exercise too much economy of effort. Take photos of every item that needs to be worked on even if that means doing a little extra walking around. Just because two items look the same to you doesn’t mean they are the same or will look the same to a professional or will require the same treatment.

And now we come to the simple stuff. Make sure that the subject of the photos is well-lit. If you can’t get good lighting, use your flash. Be aware of backlighting, which is a bright light source behind the subject that results in a darkened foreground. Look at the photos. Check that they accurately depict the colors of the items. Make sure they’re in focus. If they’re blurry, take them again.

Getting good service sometimes requires that you provide good information. Taking just a few extra moments to gather and present that information will probably result in a more accurate estimate and a better, cheaper, and more efficient work product. At the very least, it will be appreciated.

Sometimes the thumbpress on this older model of Schlage handleset gets all lopsided and then the latch won’t retract far enough to open the door. The repair is not that difficult and requires no parts. This isn’t a thorough step-by-step but with the photos, a few tools, and the right amount of confidence, I think you can sort this out.

The issue is that a roll pin comes loose from one of its two anchor points. To get to it you must first take the handleset off the door. If your handleset has a nickel-sized through-bolt cap below the knob on the interior side, somewhere along the edge there’s a break where you can use a small screwdriver to pry it off; there’s no reason to scratch the paint in doing this. Once the handleset is off the door, remove all four screws that you see. Pay attention to how everything is assembled as you go, since you’ll have to reassemble it when you’re done. Once you get to the roll pin, push it back through the hole it slipped out of. You could use some tongue-and-groove pliers for this. Then—and this is important!—use your pliers to crimp both ends of the roll pin so that it can’t come loose again.

Now put it all back together. As soon as you have the thumbpress reaffixed and one or two of the other screws back in, test the thumbpress for springiness. If it’s not doing what it’s supposed to, back up and try again. The part that’s potentially confusing during reassembly is the position of the spring. The free straight end should be pointing toward the top of the handleset. When it comes time to mount it back on the door, make sure to rotate the spindle so that the bulbous side is closer to the edge of the door. Otherwise you’ll find that the thumbpress is hard to depress, and then people in your house with less grip strength will complain.

That’s it. You can do this. Godspeed.

For my last job of the day yesterday my customer showed up late. I told him I was going to add a little to the bill for the time I spent waiting. He said, “Listen, I’m really sorry. If I’d known you were going to charge extra for tardiness I would have left the office earlier and gotten here on time.”

It’s quite common for managers of apartment buildings and condominiums to keep copies of all the unit keys on site. This is useful if a resident gets locked out or if there’s an emergency maintenance issue like a gas leak or a burst pipe when no one is home. Last week there was a break-in at the office of a large condominium complex in Sammamish and the keys to hundreds of units were stolen. The property managers hired a large locksmith company to resolve the problem, but they couldn’t come out for a week. Meanwhile, some thief had keys to all the residents’ apartments. I’ve been pretty busy rekeying locks for many of the folks who didn’t want to wait for the locksmith hired by the management company.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this. Once I did a bunch of work for a maid service company that had all its keys stolen and subsequently had to take responsibility for securing all of its clients’ houses. Another time a client who is a residential property manager had his laptop and a bunch of keys stolen from his home office. The keys were not labeled with their addresses but there was enough information in the laptop to figure out what address each key went to. We thought we were being overly cautious when we treated this like a five-alarm emergency, contacting all the tenants to quickly rekey their houses. But the one couple who was sluggish about scheduling with me saw their home burglarized.

If you’ve been entrusted to keep a lot of people’s keys, how do you store them? Are they in a proper safe or are they in a flimsy steel lockbox that can be pried open with ease? Are they labeled with the bare unit numbers are do you have a coding system that’s not easily decipherable? If all of the keys were stolen, how quickly could you secure all those homes, and what would it cost? Do you already have a plan in place? If these questions make you uncomfortable, it might mean that you need to get your house in order. And if the place that you live keeps a copy of the key to your home, you would not be unreasonable to ask some of these questions.