A downtown worth preserving and a suburb worth securing
Athens is two jobs in one city, and the gap between them is wider than almost anywhere else we work.
Within a few blocks of the square, and through the older streets near Athens State University, you find some of the best-preserved historic door hardware in North Alabama. Mortise lock bodies set into the stile of the door, rim locks, original knob sets and escutcheons, doors that have been rehung and repainted a dozen times and are still hanging.
Fifteen minutes away, subdivisions are still going up. Limestone has been one of Alabama’s fastest-growing counties for years, and those houses have modern cylinders, builder-grade strike plates and a key history that starts with a lockbox.
Historic hardware: repair, not replace
This is the position we hold most firmly, so it is worth stating plainly.
When a mortise lock stops working, the common quote is a replacement — bore the door for a modern deadbolt and handle set, fit new hardware, done in an hour. It is faster to price, faster to install, and it permanently destroys something irreplaceable. Once you have drilled a 2-1/8 inch bore through a hundred-year-old stile, that door is not coming back, and the original lock body and escutcheon are not items you can reorder.
A mortise lock is a serviceable machine. It comes out of the door in one piece, the case opens, and the springs, levers and bolt inside are repairable or replaceable. They were designed on the assumption that someone would maintain them, and a well-made one will comfortably outlast anything on a hardware store shelf today.
So on these properties our default is: take it apart, find out what actually failed, fix that. If it is genuinely beyond repair we will tell you, and we will look for a period-appropriate replacement before we reach for a drill.
Rentals and turnover
The rental stock around the university turns over on a predictable schedule, and rekeying between tenancies is standard practice — whatever was handed back, there is no way to know what was copied.
We price this per cylinder with volume rates for multiple units. If you are turning units over more than a couple of times a year, the better long-term answer is interchangeable cores: you pull the old core with a control key and drop a fresh one in, in about ten seconds, with no locksmith visit at all. It costs more to set up once and stops costing you from roughly the third turnover onward.
New builds on the edge
The other half of Athens work is the standard new-construction pair: a move-in rekey, because the builder’s key, the lockbox and every subcontractor have been through the house; and strike-plate reinforcement, because the factory screws hold decorative trim and nothing structural.
Neither takes long. Both are worth doing in the first week rather than the first emergency.
On the road
Highway 72 and I-65 push a lot of traffic through Limestone County, and a share of it locks its keys in at a fuel stop. Those are mobile jobs — we come to the vehicle, and the cutting machine and programmer are already in the truck, so even a lost-every-key situation is solved at the roadside rather than after a tow.