As we’ve all seen, it’s increasingly popular to replace traditional key-operated locks with electronic keypad locks. When doing so, it’s generally best to make the keyless lock the only piece of locking hardware on the door. Otherwise it is almost inevitable that at some point the other hardware will get locked and someone who does not expect to need a key will be locked out. A challenge arises when a customer wants to have keyless entry on a door that has a mortise lock.

This is not usually a simple lock swap. As it stands, the keyless options for mortise locks are mostly aimed at commercial users. They lack the affordability and user friendliness of the locks commonly offered for residential applications, and they’re not front-door pretty. But the residential keypad locks we get from the big retailers require a door preparation that is completely different from that of mortise locks. Replacing an expensive and sometimes very old mortise lock with a tubular lock entails covering or filling old holes in the door and making new ones. There are different ways of doing this, which range from labor-intensive to unattractive. It’s tempting to leave the mortise lock as it is and just add a residential keyless deadbolt higher on the door, but mortise locks are notorious for causing lockouts even when people are accustomed to using keys, so this is not a good solution.

The least hardware- and labor-intensive solution (read: quickest and cheapest) is often to modify the existing mortise lock so that it only functions as a passage handle, and then install the new keypad deadbolt above it. That’s what I did to the door in the accompanying photo. It is a commercial-style door that the customer wanted to use a specific residential keypad on.  I opened up the mortise lock body, which looks like a steampunk Rube Goldberg project inside, and plucked out a bunch of the parts that make it lock. The faceplate was left with two empty spaces where locking elements used to be, and the keyed cylinder is no longer functional. For a more finished look we could have replaced the faceplate with one that didn’t have those holes and replaced the cylinder with a dummy, but the customer deemed it unnecessary.

It’s possible that this post will be a curious internet fossil within a couple of years, as lock manufacturers are rapidly putting out new products to meet the growing demand for keyless entry. Until then, my advice, when practical, will be to leave your beautiful front door as it is and put the keypad lock on the mudroom door, which rarely has a mortise lock on it.

A great deal of my time as a locksmith is spent rekeying people’s locks so that existing keys will no longer allow access to their homes and businesses. Usually when moving into a new space it’s wise to rekey all the locks. Sometimes we take that measure but later lose faith in someone that we ourselves have given a key to. Here are a few situations I’ve encountered where rekeying was clearly the right course of action:

-A landlord called me up requesting an urgent rekey of his rental property on Mercer Island. His tenant had been taking a nap on her sofa when an unfamiliar young man walked in, announcing to the house that he was home. He had been backpacking in Europe and while he was gone his family moved without telling him. His key still worked, though.

-A woman in Newcastle left her dog in the care of a female house sitter while she went on vacation. She had cameras set up in her house so she could watch her dog throughout the workday, and the house sitter turned them to face the walls. She reasoned that someone staying in a hotel room wouldn’t want to be subject to video monitoring, and so she shrugged it off. What she did not shrug off was when she came home a day early and walked through her master bedroom only to find an unknown man taking a bubble bath in her tub. The married house sitter had been using the gig as an opportunity to meet with a paramour, and left him in the house while she went to work.

-A widow in North Seattle came home from the grocery store and found her next-door neighbor standing in her bedroom. When she asked him what he was doing and how he got in, he explained that he still had the key from when the previous owner lived there, and that he’d come in because he was “just curious.” In addition to this being outrageously inappropriate, it was also rather unfortunate because the woman had been good friends with him and his wife, and this incident would be hard to get past.

I don’t even like it when unexpected visitors knock on my front door, so I can’t imagine how unhappy I would be if I found one on the other side of that sacred barrier. Thinking back on these incidents, I almost want to rekey my own house just for good measure.