Daly City neighborhood · 24/7
Westlake: one house plan repeated street after street, and a garage door at the sidewalk that gets used more in a week than the front door does in a year
The center of the tract that filled this end of the city from 1949 into the early sixties: lots twenty-five to thirty feet wide, a single-car garage level with the sidewalk, the living floor half a flight above it, and an outside stair up to a front door that mostly meets deliveries. Twelve minutes out from the base at Westlake center, and no address on this map sits closer.
~12 min
Avg. arrival
$89
Service call
24/7
Availability
Ask anyone on these streets to describe their front door and you will usually get a description of the garage. The car comes off the street into the garage, the household walks through the door in the back or the side wall of that garage and up into the kitchen, and the stair to the porch is for guests and packages. That single habit decides most of what happens on this page. The lower door takes every arrival and every departure, it is the last thing locked at night, and it is therefore the lock that wears out first while the handsome one at the top of the steps sits untouched. When you call, name that door rather than saying the front, because the two are eight feet apart vertically and take different parts off the van. A house lockout is $129 to $239, with the $89 visit counted inside that figure instead of stacked on top of it.
The repetition helps you. When a builder puts up the same split-level a few thousand times, the bore, the backset and the height of the strike repeat too, so a technician who has opened one of these lower doors has effectively opened yours. What also repeats is the count nobody makes: there is a lock on the roll-up or the pedestrian door beside it, a second on the door from the garage into the house, a third at the top of the outside stair, and often a fourth on a gate to the back. Households replace one of the four and assume the rest were done. Rekeying is $29 to $46 per cylinder and the whole set takes about an hour once everything is standing open.
Houses of eleven hundred to fourteen hundred square feet with three bedrooms hold a lot of people and a lot of history, and the keys reflect it. Sixty and seventy years of tenants, relatives, contractors, a downstairs room let out for a while, a neighbor who watered plants one summer. When one of these houses changes hands the useful first appointment is not a purchase at all, it is a count: every cylinder repinned onto keys you cut yourself, which retires the entire drawer of old ones without taking a single lock off a door. If a cylinder is genuinely past pinning, replacement runs $125 to $329, and you get told that with the lock in hand rather than over the phone.
The other steady half of the work here is parked. Daly City BART holds 2,068 spaces at the top of John Daly Blvd and the Westlake shopping center sits on about forty acres of surface parking, which is enough asphalt to generate keys shut in trunks all day long. A car lockout is $105 to $199, a fob programmed at $95 to $199, a replacement key cut and coded beside the car at $155 to $419. Evenings from 8pm add $50 and the hours from midnight to 7am add $90, both inside the number you agree to. The labor is covered for ninety days and that term is printed on your receipt.
Say which of the two doors stopped you: the one at sidewalk level under the house, or the one at the top of the outside stair. If it is the lower one, say whether you can get into the garage at all, since a roll-up that will not lift is a different job from a locked pedestrian door. Give the cross street, because the numbers on these blocks run in long unbroken sequences and a digit misheard is four minutes lost.
Nearby
Over the hill, the same van
FAQ
Asked about Westlake
I said front door on the phone and the technician asked me three more questions. Why?+
Because on these streets front door means two different things. Half the households here mean the door inside the garage, the one they actually walk through, and half mean the one at the top of the outside steps. The parts, the approach and sometimes the method differ, so those three questions decide whether the job takes ten minutes or thirty. The figure, $129 to $239 for a house lockout, does not change either way.
We just bought here. How many cylinders is a full rekey on one of these houses?+
Usually four, sometimes five. The lock on the roll-up or the pedestrian door beside it, the door from the garage into the house, the front door upstairs, a back or side gate, and now and then a laundry room off the garage with a keyway of its own. At $29 to $46 each that is a small figure for retiring every key cut since the fifties, and the $89 is counted a single time for the visit rather than once per door.
Every house on our block is the same plan. Does that make our locks less private?+
The plan repeated, the keying did not. Cylinders were pinned individually and a neighbor's key does not open your door. What genuinely repeats is the wear pattern: identical doors, identical daily use and identical exposure mean the lower cylinders on a block tend to fail within a few years of each other. If two neighbors have already had theirs done, yours is worth looking at before it strands somebody.
Open 24 hours, 7 days
Say which door you are standing at and the call gets short
Daly City and the north Peninsula, every hour of the day. The door decides the work and the work decides the number, so the figure comes back on the call with the $89 call-out and the hour already inside it, and it is the figure on the receipt. Ninety days on the labor, in writing.