Sand, salt and pine needles
A key that travels between a beach bag and a pocket brings sand back with it, and that sand ends up in the keyway. It is the most ordinary fault around here, and it rarely shows up in July: it shows up in September, once the mechanism has picked up enough grains to catch in earnest. The reflex that makes everything worse is the oily lubricant bought in a hurry: it sticks the dust in place instead of flushing it out and turns harmless grit into a complete seizure, often just as you are closing the house up.
Outdoor access points suffer even more. Garden gates, letterboxes on the boundary, the padlock on a board store, shutter locks exposed to the westerly wind: salt-laden air attacks them all year round, and under the pines you can add needles and resin clogging the lower strike plates and the runners. A check at the end of the season, as you close the house up, avoids most of the seizures you would otherwise discover on your return, and rarely at a convenient moment.
Reopening a house that has been shut all winter
From October to April, many homes here are neither occupied nor heated. Damp works on the joinery: a wooden door leaf swells, a door drops slightly on its hinges, and the top point of a multipoint lock no longer meets its strike plate. In spring you have to lift the door to get it to lock — a classic and telling symptom. Forcing it at that stage puts the rod linkage out of true and turns a simple adjustment into a full mechanism replacement, which is a different matter altogether in both time and parts.
The right moment to deal with all this is when you reopen the house, not the day before tenants arrive. The alignment of the leaf in its frame is checked, a strike plate is repositioned, the play in the hinges is taken up, and every locking point is tested, including those on the side door and the garage. A detailed quote is drawn up before any work and an invoice is always provided: useful when the owner is not there and a manager or a neighbour has let the tradesman in on their behalf.
How does this service work?
Techniques, typical situations, standards and things to watch out for: it is all on our locksmith repairs page. This page focuses on what the service involves in La Teste-de-Buch.