Deadbolts fitted in Tingalpa

Front doors get attention because they are visible. The door between the garage and the house rarely does, and on most builds it carries the cheapest compliant hardware available at the time. Get into the garage — often the simplest part of the property to enter — and that single door is all that is left.

The same goes for laundry doors, back doors behind a fence where nobody can see, and sliding doors whose keeper has drifted out of alignment until the hook no longer fully engages. These are the points worth spending on, and they are almost always cheaper to fix than the front door was.

AS 4145 sets out how a lockset has to perform — force, wear, weather. It is the benchmark worth asking for, and it is what we fit.

Equally important is what the lock is fitted into. A quality deadbolt screwed into soft architrave with short screws fails at the frame, not the lock. Long screws into the stud and a strike plate that distributes the load are where most of the actual resistance comes from.

An ordinary key can be copied at a hardware counter in a couple of minutes with no questions asked. A restricted key cannot: the blank is patented and only available to the locksmith who holds the system, and copies are cut only on the written authority of whoever is named on it.

For a house that usually does not matter. For a rental portfolio, a shop, an office or a body corporate it matters a great deal, because it converts a pile of keys nobody can account for into a register of who holds what.