On most of Coquitlam's detached housing the garage is built onto the house, which puts a second way in behind the kitchen wall. We fit and rekey garage door locks at the driveway: T-handles on the overhead door, deadbolts on the walk-in side door, slide bolts, and a cylinder in the connecting door that most builders leave on a plain knob.
Three separate locks usually sit on one Coquitlam garage: the overhead door, the walk-in side door where the house has one, and the connecting door into the living space. They wear at different rates, they rarely share a key, and the third one often has no cylinder in it at all.
Most of the housing this work lands on is detached and carries its garage under the same roof: the 1970s and 1980s stock on the crescents off Ranch Park Way and the streets branching off Como Lake Avenue, and the two-storey houses on Westwood Plateau with a double garage and a side door beside it. That layout decides the job. Where the garage shares a wall with the kitchen, the lock that matters most is the one you walk through last, and on a large share of those houses it is a passage or privacy knob that latches but does not key. The van carries T-handles, deadbolts, slide bolts, smart-lock kits and a key machine, so the hardware goes on and the keys are cut in the same stop.
| Job | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Slide lock / cane bolt supply & install | $40–$90 |
| Rekey garage entry door to match house key | $30–$80 |
| T-handle garage door lock (supply & install) | $60–$140 |
| Side-door / man-door deadbolt install | $90–$180 |
| Connecting door deadbolt (garage → house) | $90–$170 |
| Smart lock on garage walk-in door | $180–$400 |
Each band covers the part, the labour and the call-out. A metal-clad or solid-core side door sits at the top of its band, as does a connecting door whose bore has to be opened up, and as does a restricted profile. Tell us the door and the brand stamped on the lock face when you ring and the range narrows before anyone is dispatched. If the tech spots a second cylinder worth doing while standing there, that gets priced on its own before it starts rather than folded quietly into the first number.
Overhead, walk-in side door, or the connecting door into the house. If it is the overhead one, say whether it lifts by hand or runs on a powered opener, because those take different hardware and the wrong choice works against the motor. A photo of the handle helps.
Nothing goes back to a shop and there is no second trip. One local note: the side streets off Como Lake Avenue are easy to drive straight past from the main road, so give us the nearest intersection or something visible from it and we will find the house first time.
The lock goes on, blanks are cut on the van, and where you want one key for the property the new cylinder is pinned to the key already on your ring. Then it gets worked: full bolt throw, strike engagement, and on a T-handle both latch rods reaching their catches at either side of the opening.
Much of Coquitlam's detached housing puts the garage on the house rather than behind it. The 1970s and 1980s stock around Ranch Park Way has an attached garage and a covered entry porch. The Como Lake blocks of the same era have attached garages on regular lots. Westwood Plateau runs to double garages with a side door next to them, and on Burke Mountain the attached garage is counted as one of the three cylinders in a handover rekey, alongside the front and the back. What a lot of that housing does not arrive with is a keyed cylinder on the door from the garage into the kitchen or the hallway. It goes in as an interior door, because on the drawings the garage sits inside the envelope. With the overhead door up, it does not.
The answer is a single-cylinder deadbolt on that connecting door, pinned to the key you already carry for the front. It is the same keyed-alike arrangement that makes up most of our residential list on the Austin Heights, Como Lake, Harbour Chines and Ranch Park stock: front, back and garage on one key instead of three separate ones. Como Lake houses sometimes add a fourth into the mix, the security screen door, which carries its own cylinder. Sometimes that one comes onto the same key and sometimes it will not take it, which is something we establish at the door rather than guess at over the phone.
Westwood Plateau carries more locks per house than the Coquitlam average, and on the golf-course perimeter streets, Parkway Boulevard and Plateau Crescent, some of them are restricted profiles from Medeco, Mul-T-Lock or Abloy. That changes what can be done at the garage. A restricted key is only cut inside the authorisation system the owner is enrolled in, so a T-handle or a side-door cylinder can be brought onto that system, but not from a blank off the shelf. Name the brand when you ring so the right blanks and tooling ride out with the tech on the first visit. Plenty of Plateau owners skip all that and run a household master instead, a housekeeping key that opens some doors and a family key that opens all of them, with the garage put on whichever side of that line suits the household.
Burke Mountain is the opposite problem. The hardware up there is recent and consistent, so it is not the lock that needs attention, it is who already holds a key to it. Builder cylinders are keyed to a construction master, which means the subtrades, the inspectors, the site superintendent and the realtor who walked the house all carry something that opens the front door and the attached garage, and none of them are obliged to mention it when they hand a key back or run off a copy. The garage cylinder is the one that opens into the house, so it belongs on the handover list beside the front and the back. Closing weeks fill up on those streets, so book ahead when you know the date.
Not every garage lock is on the garage. On the ring of streets around Mundy Park, and on the Ranch Park blocks that back onto it, a side-yard gate or a back gate gets more attention than the front walk. Trail access points reach the park from several directions along the edges of residential lots, so people on that boundary tend to be deliberate about the perimeter of their own property, and the hardware that follows from it is padlock work rather than deadbolt work. A gate that lives outdoors wants a hardened shackle. A low-profile hasp wants a discus body, which is the shape made for it. If the padlock comes from the Weiser, Kwikset or Schlage family it can usually be pinned to the house key, so the gate, the garage and the front door all run off one. A good number of padlock brands cannot be rekeyed at all, which is worth knowing before you buy one rather than after.
Two different jobs meet at the same door. Cylinders, keys, keying, T-handles and deadbolts are the lock half, and that is the whole of what this page covers. The mechanism the door runs on is the other half: tracks, rollers, lift cables, springs, panels and the opener motor, each carrying its own parts and its own ranges on the garage door repair and garage door opener repair pages. Book against the symptom rather than the door. What separates the two is usually the key: a new handle can be bolted on by anybody, but pinning its cylinder to the key already on your ring is lock work, and on a Coquitlam house with an attached garage that is usually the entire reason for the call. Say what the door is doing when you ring and two questions settle which visit you are booking.
Every one of these runs off the same van and the same number. Open the one you are in for the local detail.
The garage is rarely the only thing on the list. Here is the rest of what the same technician can take on in the same stop.