Digital door lock fitting in Stockport

Stockport has a lot of inter-war semis and Victorian terraces, and their front doors fall into two camps: original or near-original timber, and uPVC replacements fitted twenty-odd years ago.

Timber is usually the easier of the two. A solid timber door takes a smart lock well, and where the existing mortice is the wrong size we can make good rather than work around it.

The uPVC of that era is where we turn work down most often. The mechanism inside is frequently at the end of its life, and hanging a new lock on a failing multipoint means you pay twice — once for us, and again when the mechanism goes.

A lot of the semis around Heaton Moor, Reddish and Cheadle have a side door into the kitchen as well as the front door, and in practice the side door is the one the family uses. It is usually the better place to start: one lock on the door everyone actually goes through, with the front door kept as it is or done to match later on the same app.

Most of these side doors are uPVC; see uPVC and composite doors for what we check.

We check the mechanism before we quote, not after. If it needs replacing first we say so and price both, and you can decide whether the door is worth it.

Sometimes it is not. A door that has dropped on its hinges, or where the frame has moved, is a bad foundation for anything, and we would rather lose the job than fit onto it.