Lock Replacement in Vancouver, WA

Where the older doors are

Older doors turn up in particular Vancouver neighborhoods, and the city's profiles point to these:

• Carter Park has craftsman bungalows from the early to mid-1900s.
• Arnada has vintage homes near downtown and uptown.
• Hudson's Bay includes the restored Officers Row residences, along with older frame houses and bungalows.

On doors this old, the lock may be a mortise lock set into a pocket cut in the door's edge, or a newer deadbolt drilled beside it years later. A replacement has to suit what is already cut into the wood, and filling or covering old holes can be part of the job. If the house is restored or you want to keep period hardware, say so; an old mortise lock can sometimes be serviced through lock repair rather than swapped out.

Ranches and 1990s houses

Evergreen Highlands, on a bluff above the Columbia River, has ranch homes from the 1950s through the 1970s. Houses from those decades may still have their original knob locks, sometimes without a separate deadbolt. Adding one means boring the door and cutting a strike pocket in the frame.

The Census Bureau's 2024 estimates say 20.5 percent of Vancouver's homes were built in the 1990s alone. Doors of that era are often pre-bored to standard sizes, so replacing a worn knob, lever or deadbolt mostly comes down to matching the bore diameter and the backset, the distance from the door edge to the center of the hole.

Replace, rekey or repair

• Replace a lock that is cracked, badly worn or no longer latches, or an original Evergreen Highlands knob that you want to pair with a deadbolt.
• Rekey when the hardware is sound and you only need old keys to stop working; see lock rekeying.
• Repair when the hardware is original to a Carter Park bungalow, or is hard to match.

Describing the door

Give your neighborhood and roughly when the house was built, photos of the lock from inside and outside and of the door edge, how many locks you want changed, and whether they should share one key. For how replacement works in general, see lock replacement; the neighborhoods above are described on the Vancouver page.