Westlake Palisades: the bluff above the ocean, where the garage door at the sidewalk faces the weather head on

The plan is the same as the rest of the tract, so the daily door is still the one at sidewalk level under the house, and that is where the calls come from. What is different up here is what that door lives through. The garage face is often the most exposed surface on the whole property, taking wind straight off the water for most of the year, and the pedestrian door beside it or in the back of the garage gets the same treatment through every gap in the opening. A lockout is $129 to $239 with the $89 already inside the figure, but the more useful sentence on this page is the one about timing: nobody up here should be surprised by a lower cylinder, because it will always give a season of warning before it stops.

The warning is a key that begins to want a particular angle. Nothing corrodes on the outside of the lock where you would notice it; the damage happens up inside the keyway, where the pins and their springs sit in a channel that coastal air passes through every day. A pin needs to grow only a few thousandths of an inch rough to stop dropping cleanly into line, which is why one of these cylinders is finished long before it looks like anything is wrong with it. Washing it out is worth doing at the first sign and pointless once the plug has pitted. After that it is a replacement at $125 to $329, and the finish is most of that decision: standard chrome-plated builder's hardware was specified for indoor openings, and the 630 stainless version of the same lock is what belongs on a wall facing the water.

The same exposure is the reason to be careful about what goes on that door electronically. A keypad lock is a reasonable thing to want on the entrance a family uses every day, and it works fine here provided the unit is rated to live outdoors and the mechanical key underneath it is cut and pinned when the lock is fitted rather than left as a promise. Installation is $189 to $479. Where somebody wants the code on the exposed side of the house and the honest answer is that the model chosen will not survive there, you hear it before it is installed.

The bluff adds one more thing worth knowing. Ground on the coastal edge of this city moves, most visibly at Mussel Rock down the slope, and doors on properties near the edge do occasionally stop meeting their strikes for reasons that have nothing to do with the lock. When a bolt starts landing low against its keeper and the door has to be lifted before the key will turn, that is the building talking rather than the hardware, and it is corrected by moving the keeper rather than by buying a cylinder. Twenty-one minutes is the run out here, evenings add $50 and overnights $90, and ninety days covers the work.