Locksmith in Lemon Grove: small city, old locks
Under four square miles, and about 46% of the homes were built before 1960. Old hardware, mostly on houses.
- 5.0 from 857 Google reviews
- California Locksmith Licence #7974
- Open 24 hours, 7 days
- Mobile: homes, cars and businesses
¿Necesita un cerrajero? Llámenos al (619) 703-0328. Abierto 24 horas, todos los días.
Small, old and mostly houses
Why the housing age shows up in our diary
Lemon Grove became California's 414th city on 1 July 1977, long after most of its houses were built.
The city's own housing analysis puts roughly 46% of dwelling units as pre-1960 (around 26 percentage points above the regional figure) and about 66% of the stock as single-family, against about 51% across the county. Mobile homes are under 1%.
So the typical Lemon Grove callout is a detached house with a front door, a back door, a garage side door and a gate, all fitted at different times by different owners, none of them sharing a key. Cylinders from the 1950s and 60s are still in service on plenty of them. They can be rekeyed and serviced far more often than people expect, and where they genuinely cannot, replacing one lock is a smaller job than replacing four.
It is a compact city, which helps: 3.88 square miles at about 446 feet of elevation, with the 94 running along the boundary it shares with La Mesa and the 125 crossing it. Broadway and Lemon Grove Avenue meet at the Big Lemon, the three-thousand-pound concrete lemon that started life as a 1928 parade float and was plastered into place a couple of years later, with “Best Climate On Earth” on its base. Half the directions we get given here are measured from it.
The Orange Line trolley runs through as well, with stops at Lemon Grove Depot and Massachusetts Avenue, which is worth mentioning only because the streets around a trolley stop are where we most often get called to a car with the keys shut inside it. For a small city it is a full workload: sixty-year-old cylinders serviced or retired, a whole house put onto one key, high security fitted where a door faces the street, keys and fobs made for the car, storage and shed locks, and lockouts, day or night.
Lemon Grove landmarks and roads we navigate by
- The Big Lemon, Broadway at Lemon Grove Avenue
- Broadway
- Lemon Grove Avenue
- Federal Boulevard
- Massachusetts Avenue
- Lemon Grove Depot
- SR-94
- SR-125
Lemon Grove jobs
Three things an older single-family city needs
Not glamorous, all of it common here.
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Four doors, one key
Front, back, garage side door and gate, all fitted by different owners over sixty years. Where the keyways allow it we bring them onto one key; where they do not, we say so before we start.
- Lock rekey
- Master keys
- Spare keys
- Lock change and replacement
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Retiring a sixty-year-old lock
Some cylinders are genuinely finished: worn cams, cracked cases, keyways nobody makes blanks for. That is the point to upgrade the street-facing doors and leave the rest.
- High security locks
- Lock change and replacement
- Lock repair
-
Keys shut in the car
Around the depot, along Broadway and at the shops. We open it at the kerb with automotive tools, and cut a replacement on the spot if the key is gone rather than locked in.
- Car lockouts
- Lost keys
- Car key making, cutting and duplication
- Key fob replacement and programming
The full list
Everything we do
Residential, commercial and automotive. If it locks, we work on it.
- Car lockouts
- House lockouts
- Lost keys
- Ignition repair
- High security locks
- Key extraction / broken key extraction
- Lock repair
- Lock change and replacement
- Lock rekey
- Master keys
- Key fob replacement and programming
- Transponder key programming
- Car key making, cutting and duplication
- Spare keys
- Storage-unit and trunk openings
- Commercial and business security
Next door
The streets either side of this one
Lemon Grove is small enough that its neighbours are minutes away: La Mesa across the 94, Spring Valley and La Presa east, San Diego west.
Encanto and the streets west of the city line are San Diego proper. Every job on this page is the same job on our emergency locksmith, residential locksmith and full locksmith services pages. This page is only about doing it here. The whole coverage map is on the home page.
FAQ
Lemon Grove questions
My house is from the 1950s. Can the original locks be saved?
More often than people assume. A mid-century cylinder with worn pins can usually be serviced and rekeyed, and it will then work better than it has in years.
What cannot be saved is a cracked case, a bent bolt, a worn cam, or a keyway so obsolete that no blank exists for it. We will tell you which one you have and price both options.
Every door in the house has a different key. Can you fix that?
Usually. Where the locks share a compatible keyway we rekey them all to one key: front, back, garage side door and, if the padlock allows it, the gate.
In a house that has had sixty years of owners, it is common to find one or two locks that will not join the set. We will tell you which ones and what replacing them involves before we touch anything.
Do you come out to Lemon Grove at night?
Yes. The phone is answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including weekends and public holidays, and Lemon Grove is a short run off the 94 or the 125.
Call (619) 703-0328, say where you are, and we will give you a time and a price before we set off rather than after we arrive.
Someone locked their keys in the car near the trolley stop.
Common call. Give us the street and the nearest landmark (the depot, the Big Lemon at Broadway and Lemon Grove Avenue, a shop name), and stay with the car if it is safe to.
We open it with proper automotive tools on the door mechanism. If the key is genuinely gone rather than shut inside, we can cut and program a new one at the vehicle.
Is a high security lock overkill for a house here?
On an interior door or a garage that opens into a fenced yard, yes. On a street-facing front door, a back door out of sight of neighbours, or a house where a key went missing and never turned up, it is the one upgrade that genuinely changes the picture.
The keys cannot be copied on a supermarket machine, and the cylinder resists picking, drilling and bumping. We would rather fit one good one than four ordinary ones.
Talk to us now
Sixty-year-old lock, or keys on the seat.
Lemon Grove is minutes off the 94. Call and we will tell you the price and the time before we leave.
(619) 703-0328Open 24 hours, 7 days. California Locksmith Licence #7974.
¿Necesita un cerrajero en San Diego? Llámenos al (619) 703-0328. Abierto 24 horas.