A deadbolt you have to lift the door to throw, a latch that skips its keeper, a closer that has stopped holding at the top of its sweep. Fast Locksmith Coquitlam repairs doors, frames and door hardware anywhere in the city, same day, mobile, and the technician gives you the price before the first screw comes out.
Mortise bodies in Maillardville, builder hardware on Burke Mountain, multi-point front doors in River Springs. Different doors, one order of diagnosis: frame first, hardware second.
When a Coquitlam deadbolt starts to bind, the strike plate gets looked at before the cylinder does. A bolt that catches on its way in is reporting geometry rather than wear: the door has dropped a couple of millimetres on a loosened hinge, or the jamb has rolled, and the keeper is no longer where the bolt goes looking for it. Fit a new lock to that door and the new one binds by the following autumn. The stock this happens to most often here is the 1970s and 1980s detached housing, the crescents running off Ranch Park Way and the residential streets branching off Como Lake Avenue, where forty-odd years of wet winters and dry summers have been working on the frame the entire time.
The ring of streets around Mundy Park gets an extra dose of it. Several hundred acres of second-growth forest pressed against the back of a property line holds damp well into the spring, and a slab that swells enough in April to need a shoulder is a slab whose latch is already sitting shallow by the time it dries out in July. People on that boundary tend to meet it at a side-yard gate or a rear door well before the front entry, because the back of the property is the side they actually use, and a gate latch that has swollen shut gets shouldered a few dozen times before anybody thinks to call about it.
Plenty of the doors we get called to in Coquitlam are not front doors at all. Harbour Chines and the central streets around it are full of post-war bungalows renovated or rebuilt on their original footprint, very often with a garden suite or a basement suite added underneath, and a property like that can end up with three exterior doors of three different vintages hanging off the same walls. The one that fails is rarely the one the renovation replaced. It is the back entry that kept its old slab and its old frame while everything around it was rebuilt, and then went twenty years without anyone checking whether the latch still reached.
What it costs depends on what actually failed and what has to be carried to the door. The bands below are what these jobs normally run here. You get a number on the phone first, and the number does not move once the van arrives.
| Service | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Hinge and alignment adjustment | $80 – $150 |
| Strike plate repositioned or upgraded | $75 – $140 |
| Closer adjustment, existing unit | $65 – $110 |
| Closer replaced, supplied and fitted | $180 – $320 |
| Frame and jamb repair after a forced entry | $150 – $350 |
| Hinge replacement, per hinge, hardware included | $90 – $180 |
| Multi-point lock mechanism adjustment | $120 – $220 |
| Full hardware replacement, handle set and latches | $160 – $380 |
Residential and light-commercial Coquitlam work sits inside those bands. Original mortise hardware in Maillardville, the heavier commercial frames on United Boulevard and multi-point front doors in River Springs can sit toward the top of them. Describe the problem on the phone and we will narrow the range before anyone is dispatched.
Sticking, refusing to latch, slamming, dragging on a closer, split around the strike after somebody tried it overnight. Two or three questions are usually enough to put a range on it, and you get that range before a van moves.
House, strata suite, shop unit, warehouse bay. Say what the door is and roughly how old the building is, because that is what decides the load on the van: mortise cams and tailpieces for a Maillardville original, a closer body and a spare arm for a shopfront, planing gear and shims for a swollen slab, jamb stock and long-anchor strikes for anything that has been forced. If you are on the upper Burke Mountain streets off Coast Meridian Road in January, tell us what the road is actually doing and we will set the window off that rather than off the map.
The cause is found before the price is fixed. Afterwards the door runs the full cycle: latch engagement, complete deadbolt throw, closer tension, the swing from both sides. You try it yourself before anyone takes payment.
Maillardville is the oldest part of the city, founded in the early 1900s to house mill workers brought out from Quebec, and the doors still show it. Some of the houses from the 1930s and 1940s around Laval Square still carry original mortise hardware, and when one of those gives up the fault is usually inside the lock body rather than anywhere near the frame: a cam worn round, a tailpiece snapped off. Cams and tailpieces for the common profiles ride on the van, and less common components can often be sourced same or next day. What we will not do is talk anyone into tearing out hardware that still works because it happens to be old. Where the body itself has gone, the measurements get taken at the door and the replacement priced off what the pocket will actually accept, because a current lock case rarely drops straight into a mortise cut in the 1930s.
Austin Heights is a generation newer, sitting almost at the geographic middle of the city on flat, regular blocks built out through the 1950s and 1960s. Those doors tend to have collected their hardware in layers: the knob lock that came with the house, a deadbolt somebody added in the eighties or nineties, sometimes a second deadbolt or a security bar from an owner after that. We work through whatever combination is on the door rather than insisting on one, and what actually brings us out to those streets is what it is anywhere of that vintage: a frame that has sagged and a strike that has stopped lining up. The bores are worth measuring before anything is ordered, because some of those doors were drilled to a diameter no current handle set expects, though most post-war slabs here have been updated at some point and take the standard bore.
Cape Horn holds the southeast corner, its residential streets sitting on a shelf above the industrial flat, and the houses along them went up across roughly three decades ending in the 1980s. The oldest of those still have their original mortise hardware doing the job it was fitted for. Work down there often lands right on the boundary between repairing and replacing, and you get told which side of it you are on before anything starts. The neighbourhood also has a feature the rest of Coquitlam does not: older properties near the industrial edge still have chain-link yards closed with padlocked gates, a holdover from when the land use down there was less clearly divided, so gate hardware often gets sorted on the same visit as the house door.
Burke Mountain is the newest stock in the city and it still generates door work. Those slopes northeast of the city centre filled in over the past decade, and a house that recent is a house still settling into itself, so what we are usually called to up there is a door that has moved a few millimetres out of the opening it was hung in, or one that started life at the edge of its installation tolerance and has since crossed it. The fix is alignment: hinge screws taken back into the stud, the strike moved to meet the bolt where the bolt now arrives. Hardware failures up there are their own category, and the common one is the builder-fitted Weiser SmartKey cylinder after an owner has put it through a few re-learning cycles, when the key turns but the bolt stops coming all the way back or the whole thing stiffens on a cold morning. That is a cylinder to replace, not one to rekey again.
Eagle Ridge puts two generations of door on one street, the 1980s and 1990s family houses along Eagleridge Drive and Ravine Drive with 2000s and 2010s executive builds filled in around them, and both eras run Weiser and Schlage. On a hillside the ground does the arguing, and settling is common enough on those streets that misaligned frames and strike plates no longer lined up with the bolt are the bulk of what we go out for. Age is a poor guide to which door it will be. A deadbolt fitted in 1991 to a well-kept door is usually still worth keeping and good for another decade, while one of the same vintage that has been rekeyed four or five times, or that sits on an entry taking a lot of moisture, can be at the end of its life. Which of the two is in front of us gets settled at the door.
On Westwood Plateau a common complaint is a deadbolt that has stopped travelling its full length. On hardware from the late 1990s that is a genuine coin toss between a cylinder whose pin springs have gone soft and a slab that has settled in its opening, and the two are told apart by where the bolt stops rather than by how the key feels in the hand. River Springs front doors are heavier again and often carry a multi-point mechanism, where the top and bottom points give up meeting their keepers before the centre one does. That is alignment, not mechanism. A mechanism that has actually failed gets quoted on its own, and part of that work is past what a mobile visit can finish.
In the concrete towers, the ones ringing Lafarge Lake, the ones on Clarke Road and the new ones going up in Coronation Park, the line runs at your own front door. A suite entry that has dropped in its frame, a closer on it that has gone heavy, a strike that has stopped catching: that is ours. Step back out past it, into the lobby, down the parkade ramp, into an elevator lobby or an amenity room, and the door is the strata corporation's. Those get repaired on the property manager's instruction, not on a resident's, which is why it is worth knowing which side of your own threshold the problem is on before you book.
A commercial closer is the one piece of door hardware working every minute a business is open, and it gives out in a sequence rather than all at once. First the sweep speed drifts and the door starts arriving hard at the frame. Then the latch speed goes and it bangs. Then the hold-open quits holding and the door swings back into whoever was next through. On an Austin Avenue shopfront, where the entry is in use every hour the business is open, that whole sequence can run its course faster than an owner expects. Most of it is adjustment: valve settings and spring tension, one visit, nothing supplied. What is not adjustable is a body weeping fluid down the frame, and that one is a replacement.
Panic bars and exit devices are the other commercial repair worth calling early about. The fault people report is the door failing to latch from outside. The fault that actually matters is a latch that does not fully retract when the bar is pushed, because that is a door capable of holding somebody in rather than out. We adjust and repair exit devices and replace the chassis where it has gone, and where the closer above one is equally tired both get done on the same visit.
Commercial frames also fail differently from house frames. A hollow metal frame set into block does not split the way a wood jamb splits. It deforms, and a deformed frame holds the door permanently out of square, so the latch is chasing a strike that is no longer flat to it. Where that distortion is local it gets straightened and the strike reset rather than the frame replaced. On the light-industrial flat below Cape Horn the doors are warehouse and loading-dock doors rather than customer entries, so the work runs to bent hinges, sprung frames and strikes knocked out of line by something heavier than a hand, which is a different repair from anything a shopfront needs.
One handover worth naming: when a forced entry has been secured overnight on an emergency call, the locking is finished but the carpentry is not. Cutting out the split section of jamb, taking the hinge screws back into the stud and setting a long-anchor strike flat again is daylight work, and it is what this page covers. Property managers can also put a building's entry hardware on a scheduled check, which is a considerably better way to find a closer that is about to go than having it find you at eleven at night.
Probably not. A bolt that catches on its way into the strike is normally telling you the door has moved, not that the cylinder is worn, so the hinge screws and the strike alignment get checked first. A lock fitted to a door that has dropped will bind again within a season. If the cylinder genuinely has gone, which happens to hardware that has been rekeyed four or five times and lost the spring tension in the pins, you get told that and priced for the replacement then rather than being sold one up front.
Yes, and it is nearly always the jamb that failed rather than the lock. If the property was made secure overnight, this is the follow-up in daylight: the split length of jamb cut out and a new section let in, hinge screws long enough to reach the stud behind the frame, and a long-anchor strike plate set flat so the next attempt has more than trim to get through. If the split has travelled far enough into the rough opening that the frame wants rebuilding rather than repairing, you get told so at the door rather than sold a repair that only holds until somebody tries it again.
We adjust them, and most calls in there turn out to be adjustment rather than a new mechanism. The thing to settle before any of that is the gate: the community is gated and a van does not get through a closed one on its own. Either you hand us the code when you book or somebody inside clears us, and it is much better to work out which of the two applies while you are still on the phone than to have a technician arrive and stop at the entrance. Say what brand the door hardware is if you happen to know, as well, because that is what tells us whether a part is likely to be riding on the van already or needs ordering in.
Often, yes. The usual failures are a worn cam or a snapped tailpiece, both repairable with parts carried for the common profiles, with less common components sourced same or next day where the lock is worth saving. A mortise that has only gone stiff often wants nothing more than the case cleaned out and the hub relubricated, which happens inside the visit. Worth measuring the bore while the hardware is off, too, because some of the older Maillardville and Austin Heights slabs were drilled to sizes no modern handle set fits, and discovering that after the replacement is already on the van helps nobody.
The rule of thumb is the door you unlock to get into your own home, and it holds whether that is a suite entry in a Burquitlam tower or a townhome door up at Partington Creek. Every door you walk through on the way to it belongs to the building. Those get repaired when the council or the property manager says so, which means a dragging lobby door is a note to your manager rather than a call to us, and a townhome complex with strata-managed common-area hardware works the same way. Describe the door on the phone if you are unsure and we will place it before you book anything.
That is a large share of the work here. In Harbour Chines and around the Mundy Park edge, the back gate, the side-yard door and the separate entry to a basement or garden suite come up as often as the front door, and they are the ones nobody notices have gone bad until they will not close at all. On a bungalow that was renovated around its own back entry, the frame in that opening is usually older than the wall it sits in, so the repair lands on the jamb and the strike far more often than on the lock. Sliding patio doors we take on the hardware side: rollers, latch and handle sets, multi-point adjustment. Full track replacement gets scoped at the door.
Long enough to test it properly, which is the step that usually gets skipped. Realigning hinges or moving a strike plate runs 30 to 60 minutes. A jamb reinforced after a forced entry, a closer swapped out, or a multi-point mechanism brought back into line runs 60 to 90 minutes. Travel is quoted honestly rather than optimistically: the upper Burke Mountain streets in winter and the Lougheed Highway backup late in the afternoon both move the arrival window, and we would rather say so when you call.
Fourteen areas, all inside the same Coquitlam coverage zone. Tap yours for what the doors and the access actually look like on those streets.
Rekeys, lock changes, car keys, safes, smart locks and master key systems, all off the same van and the same number.