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Locks & Doors, Doors & Locks

Jeez. This door and security lock business is turning into a huge (and hugely expensive) project. Yesterday the locksmith was here. He wants to sell me four high-security locks, to the tune of something over a thousand bucks. Medeco is the brand he recommends. Says it’s more secure than the Schlage high-security locks that remain on the market. Consumer Reports seems to agree that one model of the Medeco is probably better than other deadbolts out there. Most deadbolts can easily be picked or drilled, and the Kwikset locks I bought the other day at Home Depot seem to be about the most vulnerable of the lot. Whether the Medeco is really worth the price remains to be seen: we have here this entertaining report, in which our intrepid hackers used keys fashioned from plastic credit cards to let themselves in the Medeco-armored door…in six seconds.

Not every burglar hangs out at DefCon listening to hackers report on their latest exploits. However. The fact is, it is a pin-tumbler lock, and it is vulnerable to attack. Possibly there are other ways to discourage the Perp.

This afternoon Chip Marvin, owner of my favorite skylight, door, and window retailer came by to check out the situation and give me an estimate on replacements for the sliding doors that no longer lock and the front door whose lockset has to be screwed back on every two or three weeks. He came up with several alternatives to replacement that could save a ton of money. To wit:

Don’t replace the steel front door, which, though boringly generic, is a perfectly good door and can be refurbished. The old hole where the former lockset connected can be sealed with car body filler, and the new lockset I so unsuccessfully tried to install can be put on properly. There’s really nothing wrong with it that a little repair work and some paint won’t fix.

The problem with the back door is the two layers of kitsch created by the plastic mullions that came with the cheapie HD kitchen door overlaid by the ridiculous fake wrought iron of the new ugly security door. I proposed to ameliorate that by replacing the door with a 32-inch single-pane entry door (to the locksmith’s dismay). Instead, he suggested, if what’s wanted is a clear pane, the cheesy mullions can be removed and the cheesy glass can be replaced with a single low-E pane.

To his mind the sliding door is actually easier to secure than French doors. While the all-in-one lock does extend upward and downward into the sills, it’s simple to get them open.

Yes! The front door I’d seen at Home Depot was almost $800; by the time it was installed, the cost would have come to around a thousand bucks. The single-pane back door was a mere $288, but it was made by some outfit I’d never heard of and presumably fabricated in China or Bangladesh or Nigeria. Again, add a couple hundred bucks to install that thing—which because it only comes prehung would entail removing the new security door and reinstalling it—and we’re up around $500 or $600.

So. That’s a significant savings.

Savings, we might add, that can be thrown at the stuff I’d really like to have, to wit: upgraded Arcadia doors and replacement of the last of the tinfoil windows from the 1970s.

Chip showed me Milgard doors that match the excellent windows he installed shortly after I moved into this place. They’re low-E (none of the old sliding doors come under that heading), come in the wide-framed “French” style that I find very handsome, and they even come with the Frank Lloyd Wrightish mullions that I like in the windows I have.

When I moved in here, I didn’t change out the window in back, because there was only one of them and because I’m a cheapskate. Should’ve done that then. But as long as his crew is here installing doors, they might as well put in the one remaining bedroom window and maybe the little bathroom window, too. That will make all the doors and windows low-E, which I doubt will make a lot of difference but at least is…righteous. And it certainly will make the house look nice.

Arcadia doors can be fitted with sliding barrel bolts, which will back up the regular locks and require the Burglar to break the glass twice to get in. So with the standard lock plus one or two barrel bolts plus the traditional stick in the slider channel, the Burglar will at least have to earn his pay. And they really are very attractive doors.

 

4 thoughts on “Locks & Doors, Doors & Locks”

  1. We put Milgard low-E windows in most of ours 18 months ago and have been very pleased. Because of the cold in the winter here we had to do triple pane to get the tax break and I don’t know how much that affects things, but even without replacing the slider on the patio we achieved a minimum 10 degree difference (warmer in winter & cooler in summer) throughout the house.

    • Who would have thunk that a weird thing like a security lock on an office (read “bedroom”) door would ever pay off? Since the guy jumped the wall about two minutes after I walked into the kitchen and locked the door, he was within two minutes of walking in my back door. And where he was hiding — the garage — he could have found a box of tools that would have let him open the deadbolt in 15 seconds.

      You just never know when some wacko idea you have is going to redound to your benefit…or to your disadvantage.

      Two of the sliding doors in this house don’t lock at all — the only thing that keeps them shut is a stick in the runner. The third has a lock: a little barrel bolt that slides into a tiny ring at the floor level. Probably OK, but it would be nice if its latch worked. No two of the three doors match, and all three of them are plug-ugly. And none of them are energy-efficient. Heh! In the bedroom, if you put your hand on the window during the summertime, the glass is hot. Same is true in the family room, come to think of it.

  2. We’ve had to put shutters and heavy drapes over the floor to ceiling windows in the family room. The Oklahoma summer sun turns all of them to mini-ovens.

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