Lock Replacement in Hartford, CT

Hartford doors by era

The right replacement depends on when a door was hung, and Hartford's neighborhoods span about a century of building. Statewide, about one in five homes dates from 1939 or earlier, according to the Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey.

• South Green. Nineteenth-century houses stand beside apartment houses, many dating from about 1860 to 1900. Doors that old may still carry a mortise lock, a box set into a pocket cut in the door edge.
• West End and Upper Albany. The West End's two- and three-story homes went up between the 1900s and the 1920s, and Prospect Avenue has mansions. Upper Albany is mostly large frame two-families built in the first two decades of the 1900s.
• Blue Hills. Bloomfield Avenue and Ridgefield Street have large Tudors and colonials, and the neighborhood also has duplexes and modest capes, so two doors in it can call for different locks.
• Southwest. Small Colonial Revival and Cape Cod houses went up from the 1940s to the 1960s, alongside multi-family houses.

Keep the mortise pocket or change the door

Swapping an old mortise lock for a modern deadbolt can mean filling the pocket and drilling new holes, which permanently alters the door. On a heavy original door in the West End or South Green, it can be worth finding a mortise lock body or cylinder that fits the existing cut. On a door that is simply drilled with round holes, as a later Southwest cape may be, a like-for-like swap is the easier job.

Replacement makes sense when the cylinder turns without moving the bolt, the latch no longer catches, the deadbolt will not fully extend, or the lock is too light for the door. If the lock works and the worry is who holds keys, rekeying may be enough.

What to send

• A photo of the lock from outside and one of the door edge, which shows whether it is a mortise lock or a drilled one.
• The neighborhood, and whether the door is a shared entrance in a two-family or apartment house.
• Door material and thickness, if you know them.
• Whether the new lock should match keys you already use.

See lock replacement, lock repair if the lock only needs work, lock rekeying, or the Hartford page.