Most Vancouver garages are not a room off the kitchen. They are a separate building at the bottom of the lot, facing the lane, with a walk-in door on the side that nobody has looked at since the house last sold. We fit and rekey garage door locks on site: T-handle latches on tilt-up doors, deadbolts on that side door, slide bolts on the inside of the overhead, and the cylinder work that puts the whole lot on one key.
Three different doors get called the garage door here: the overhead door itself, the walk-in door beside it, and, on a lot where the garage has been rebuilt as a laneway house, a front door that used to be a garage. Each one takes different hardware and a different key plan.
Most garage lock advice assumes a two-car attached garage with a connecting door into the kitchen. On the laned single-family grid that covers most of this city, that door does not exist. The garage is its own building at the rear of the lot, so the two locks that matter are the garage's own walk-in door and the back door of the house, and they are usually on different keys for no reason anybody remembers. A technician arrives with T-handle latches, deadbolts, slide bolts and keypad units on the truck, works out what the door will actually take, and fits it in the driveway or at the lane. Attached garages do turn up, mostly on newer infill and townhome builds, and those get the connecting-door deadbolt that the older stock has no use for.
| Job | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Inside slide bolt or cane bolt, supplied and fitted | $40–$90 |
| Rekey the garage side door to your house key | $30–$80 |
| T-handle latch for a tilt-up door, supplied and fitted | $60–$140 |
| Deadbolt on a garage walk-in door | $90–$180 |
| Deadbolt on a connecting door into the house | $90–$170 |
| Keypad deadbolt on a garage walk-in door | $180–$400 |
Those are two separate doors and two separate cylinders: the walk-in door off the lane or the driveway, and the connecting door from the garage into the house. Metal-clad and solid-core doors, older preps that match nothing sold today, and higher-security cylinders sit at the top of the band. What the door is made of and what is on it now are the two things we ask about first, because a metal-clad walk-in and a light connecting door do not take the same prep.
Overhead, walk-in side door, or a connecting door into the house. A photo of the handle and one of the edge of the door settles the hardware question faster than any description, because the edge is where the existing prep shows.
The truck parks in the driveway or at the lane and the job happens there. If the garage sits behind a gate or the lane is blocked for a bin day, say so when you book and we will find the approach.
We fit the lock, cut keys at the truck, and where you want it, pin the new cylinder to your existing house key. Then we throw the bolt with the door closed several times, because a garage door that has moved with the season will latch fine on the bench and refuse in the frame.
East of Main, the garage went up as a separate building facing the lane, one overhead door and a walk-in door on the side. Through Hastings-Sunrise, on the post-war bungalow streets like Parker, Graveley and Kitchener, those garages sit on standard 33-foot lots and a lot of them are still on the hardware they came with: a knob latch and nothing above it, or a deadbolt that was already old when the house last changed hands. That building holds the bikes, the tools and the tires, and on plenty of those lots it is the only door on the property without a deadbolt in it. It is the shortest visit on this page and the one people put off for years.
The west side has the same layout with heavier doors. Behind the pre-war and postwar houses through Dunbar, Kerrisdale and Point Grey the garage is detached as well. A share of our Dunbar emergency calls come in on a garage pass-through lock, the door cut between the garage and the rest of the property, and it is the door people forget they are locked out of until they are standing at the back of a dark lot at eleven at night. If the jamb around it has split or the door no longer sits square, that is frame work rather than lock work and it is covered on our door repair page.
A large number of Vancouver garages are no longer garages. Through Hastings-Sunrise and the wider east side, and up in Dunbar and Shaughnessy, the building at the back of the lot has been rebuilt or replaced as a laneway house, a coach house or a garden suite, and its door is now somebody's front door. That changes the keying rather than the hardware. The sensible arrangement keeps each dwelling on its own key so no household holds access to a home it does not live in, while the owner's key still covers the shared doors: the gate, the storage side, the utility room. It is why a single Shaughnessy address can end up carrying five or six keys, and why keying a whole property alike stops being the right answer the moment a tenant is involved.
In the towers downtown, across the West End, through Yaletown and along the Cambie Corridor in Fairview, the garage is a shared underground with a roll gate on it. That gate, the remote that opens it and the door off the elevator lobby are all building hardware, ordered by the strata rather than by a resident, and none of it is what this page is about. This page covers a garage you hold a key to. If the trouble is a car sitting on level three, that is an automotive call and we take it as one.
Cylinders, keys, deadbolts and getting the whole property onto one key are this page. Track, rollers, cables, springs, hinges, sections and bottom seals are the mechanism, and that work is on our garage door repair page, booked on the same number. The dividing line is easy to find from the driveway: if the door moves but the lock does not, book from this page, and if the door will not move at all, book the repair and say whether it is stuck open or stuck shut. One overlap is worth knowing about. Once an electric opener is fitted, the overhead door is held shut by the opener's own drive, and a T-handle or slide bolt left engaged underneath it will fight the motor every time somebody hits the remote. We either take the manual lock out of service or set it up as the lock you use when the power is out and the door has been released from the opener.
Pick a neighbourhood for the local detail: the response window, the housing it is actually made of, and what a call there usually turns out to be.
The garage is one door on a lot that usually has four or five. Booking the garage cylinder is the moment to deal with the back door and the connecting door as well, while the technician is already on the lot.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
1/2" steel door, digital keypad, fitted and bolted on site.
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.