Locksmith in
Ridgewood, NJ

Ridgewood houses have a specific problem

Ridgewood's housing stock is old, and that is the whole story for a locksmith. The railway reached here in 1848, the village filled in around the station for the century that followed, and by 1970 there was effectively no farmland left to build on. What that leaves is street after street of pre-war colonials, Tudors, Dutch colonials and Victorians standing on ground that has never been cleared and started again. Plenty of them still carry their original mortise lock bodies. A mortise lock is not bored through the face of the door like a modern deadbolt. It sits in a rectangular pocket cut into the edge of the stile, with latch, bolt and knob spindle all working off one cast case. It is a different machine, and it wants a different trade.

Most locksmiths take one look at a mortise lock and quote a full hardware replacement, because swapping is easier than servicing and it is a bigger invoice. That is usually the wrong answer. The case is frequently better made than anything that would replace it, the escutcheon and the knob are part of what the house is worth, and the mechanism can be stripped, cleaned, adjusted, repaired and rekeyed to whatever key plan you want. We do that work. When replacement genuinely is the right call, because the case is cracked or the pocket has been butchered by somebody's earlier repair, we will say so and show you the part that failed. We would rather talk you out of new hardware than sell you hardware you did not need.

The other Ridgewood pattern is door count. A village colonial with a front door, a kitchen door, a mudroom entry off the driveway and a basement hatch is four exterior doors and eight cylinders before anyone has looked at the garage, the porch enclosure or the door between the garage and the house. These houses were built in an era that assumed service entrances, and nobody has ever taken them out. That is why we quote in cylinders rather than in doors. A flat three-door price given over the phone is wrong on most of the housing in this village, and it is wrong in the direction that produces an argument on the driveway once the truck is already there. We would rather count first.

The larger properties add a third layer. A good number of Ridgewood houses now carry EMTEK, Baldwin or Mul-T-Lock hardware, and renovations have put in Andersen and Marvin patio and French doors that throw several bolts along the edge of the door from one lift of the handle. Most locksmiths will not touch a multipoint. The gearing is proprietary, the cylinders are often not standard American parts, and the fault is usually in the drive strip or a dropped hinge rather than in the lock itself. We service them. If you have one of these doors and somebody has told you the whole unit needs replacing, get a second opinion before you agree to that, because the repair is frequently a fraction of the work you were quoted.