Alameda neighborhood · 24/7
Alameda Point: hangars and warehouse doors at one end of a block, new apartment buildings at the other, and a five-minute drive across everything else
The flat western tip of the island: hangars and warehouses now let to workshops, breweries, distilleries and small manufacturers, wide open roads between them, a ferry terminal, and new residential blocks going up along the waterfront. Twenty-five minutes from the van.
~25 min
Avg. arrival
$89
Service call
24/7
Availability
Doors out here are not house doors and they are not priced or handled like them. Steel leaves in steel frames, roll-ups with a man-door beside them, rear exits with bars, and cylinders that have been getting rougher for a year before anyone mentions it. A business lockout is $141 to $258. Storefront and steel door hardware is $162 to $472 and it is counted per opening, which matters in a building with a front entrance, a rear service door and a door into a yard. A mortise cylinder that has stopped turning is repinned at $30 to $47 rather than discarded, and that gets tried before anything is quoted for replacement.
Exit devices are the constant here and most of them are not dead. A bar that depresses without latching is far more often a device left dogged, a vertical rod out of length, or a strike knocked out of line by something heavy going through the opening, than a mechanism that has failed. All three are adjustments and adjustment happens first. Where the chassis really is finished, panic bars and exit devices are $302 to $769 per door, so a building with four rear exits hears four figures rather than one number for the lot. A door that looks shut and holds nothing is a fire-code item before it is anything else, which is why these calls are taken early.
The bigger schemes are quoted rather than listed, because no list describes a building. When a yard gate, a loading door, a parts room and a front office all have to open to different people while one key covers everything, that is a master key system, and it is priced against the real door schedule after somebody has walked it with a notebook. Access control on a door three shifts pass through, where a credential has to stop working the afternoon somebody leaves, is quoted the same way and with a mechanical override that still works when the network does not. Both come back with a written chart of what opens what, since in a building with turnover the chart is the first thing to go missing.
The new residential blocks on the waterfront are the other half of the work and they carry the island's usual question in a modern form: a lobby door, a garage gate and a mail room that everybody in the building uses, and a unit door that belongs to one household. A lockout at your own door is $132 to $242 and repinning between residents is $30 to $47 per cylinder. The lobby, the gate and the mail room are ordered by the building rather than by a resident. Twenty-five minutes is the honest run, most of it spent crossing the island rather than getting onto it, and it is said before you agree to wait for it.
Name the opening and where it sits: the man-door beside the roll-up, the roll-up itself, a rear exit with a bar, the office door or a yard gate. Say what time the shift or the taproom starts so the visit lands ahead of it, and whether an alarm company needs to know a technician is coming. For a new apartment building, give the building and say whether the lobby needs a fob.
Nearby
Over the hill, the same van
FAQ
Asked about Alameda Point
The bar on our rear door clicks but the door still pushes open. New device?+
Not usually. On a door that has pallets and kegs through it all day, the commonest reason a latch stops holding is a device left dogged, a rod out of length or a strike knocked out of line. All three are put right during the visit. A chassis that is genuinely finished is $302 to $769 and it is counted per door, and you hear which of the two applies while the technician is still standing at it.
Can a master key set for our building be priced over the phone?+
Not honestly. A yard, a loading door, a parts room and an office that all open to different people is a door schedule, and a schedule has to be walked and counted. The walk is arranged first and the quote comes back as one itemized figure with a chart of which key opens what. What can be said on the phone is what the walk-through costs.
Twenty-five minutes is the second longest run you list. What is in it?+
The width of the island, mostly. Getting onto the island is the short part and driving out to this end is the long one, past everything else on the map. The figure is measured from where the van is standing when you call, through the crossing it will use, and if it is going to run longer tonight you are told then rather than afterward.
Open 24 hours, 7 days
Say whether it is the street door or your own, and the rest of the call is short
Alameda and Bay Farm, at any hour. Which leaf it is decides who approves the work, the door itself decides the work, and the work decides the number, which is settled on the phone with the $89 visit and any late hour already inside it. It reads the same on the receipt. Ninety days on the labor, in writing.