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One of the blessings that comes of having these confounded devices on our persons at all times is that it’s really easy to take and share photos. This is so handy when it comes to getting work done at your home or office. It used to be necessary for a specialty contractor to show up to a job almost completely blind. He’d hope to have what he needed to complete the project, but lots of times he wouldn’t, and it would result in a return trip. Sometimes the first trip would be presented as a free estimate. But let’s be real; one way or another, the cost of those visits would be worked into the price and passed onto you, the customer.

Now that it’s so easy to provide photos ahead of a job that needs doing, many of these wasted trips can be averted. But sometimes I ask customers to send me photos and I get the sense that they resent the request. Maybe they’ll send one terrible photo that isn’t what I asked for, or even question why I need photos when they’ve already given me a perfectly good explanation of the issue. Sometimes I have to ask a few times for reasonably helpful photos and end up turning the work away because I get tired of the back and forth. Customers don’t always realize that the ultimate purpose of providing good photos is to save them time and money by enabling us to work more efficiently.

When I receive unhelpful photos, it’s not always that the customer is doing a willfully bad job of taking pictures. I have come to understand that photography is a form of communication and taking bad photos is often accompanied by an inability to offer clear descriptions and explanations. Some people just have a really hard time putting themselves in another’s shoes and imagining how information will be received and processed, whether it be presented verbally or visually.

So I’ve been trying to come up with some tips on providing helpful photos to contractors. Some are more basic than others.

Occasionally a person will call me and immediately say something like, “Hey, how much to fix my latch?” I have no idea what they’re talking about and it takes me many questions to get on the same page as them. It’s so much easier for me if someone calls up and says something like this: “I have a business in downtown Bellevue. The main door is glass with a metal frame. The lock isn’t working. Can you help me?” Armed with that information, which goes from general and contextual to more specific, I’m on track to start asking the right questions to zero in on the specific problem.

With photos, the strategy should be the same. If possible, provide a photo from space. Then provide a photo of the general work site, and then one of the specific thing to be worked on. One time a customer sent me an extreme close-up of a deadbolt that wasn’t working right. I couldn’t diagnose the problem over the phone but as soon as I pulled into the driveway I could see that the Christmas wreath hanging from the top of the door was probably preventing it from closing all the way, thus interfering with the alignment of the lock. The solution was to hang the wreath from a nail instead. I might well have diagnosed that from afar if I’d had a photo of the whole door.

Taking and sending photos is free, so don’t be stingy. Assume that you don’t know everything the expert needs to see. Don’t censor the photos based on your impression of the problem. Take photos from different angles. And show the service provider more than you think he needs to see. Don’t limit the photos to close-ups. Trust that if you pan out and take good high-resolution photos, the service provider will know how to zoom in on them. If he only receives close-ups, he won’t be able to zoom out to see what lies beyond the edges of your photos.

And try not to exercise too much economy of effort. Take photos of every item that needs to be worked on even if that means doing a little extra walking around. Just because two items look the same to you doesn’t mean they are the same or will look the same to a professional or will require the same treatment.

And now we come to the simple stuff. Make sure that the subject of the photos is well-lit. If you can’t get good lighting, use your flash. Be aware of backlighting, which is a bright light source behind the subject that results in a darkened foreground. Look at the photos. Check that they accurately depict the colors of the items. Make sure they’re in focus. If they’re blurry, take them again.

Getting good service sometimes requires that you provide good information. Taking just a few extra moments to gather and present that information will probably result in a more accurate estimate and a better, cheaper, and more efficient work product. At the very least, it will be appreciated.

Sometimes the thumbpress on this older model of Schlage handleset gets all lopsided and then the latch won’t retract far enough to open the door. The repair is not that difficult and requires no parts. This isn’t a thorough step-by-step but with the photos, a few tools, and the right amount of confidence, I think you can sort this out.

The issue is that a roll pin comes loose from one of its two anchor points. To get to it you must first take the handleset off the door. If your handleset has a nickel-sized through-bolt cap below the knob on the interior side, somewhere along the edge there’s a break where you can use a small screwdriver to pry it off; there’s no reason to scratch the paint in doing this. Once the handleset is off the door, remove all four screws that you see. Pay attention to how everything is assembled as you go, since you’ll have to reassemble it when you’re done. Once you get to the roll pin, push it back through the hole it slipped out of. You could use some tongue-and-groove pliers for this. Then—and this is important!—use your pliers to crimp both ends of the roll pin so that it can’t come loose again.

Now put it all back together. As soon as you have the thumbpress reaffixed and one or two of the other screws back in, test the thumbpress for springiness. If it’s not doing what it’s supposed to, back up and try again. The part that’s potentially confusing during reassembly is the position of the spring. The free straight end should be pointing toward the top of the handleset. When it comes time to mount it back on the door, make sure to rotate the spindle so that the bulbous side is closer to the edge of the door. Otherwise you’ll find that the thumbpress is hard to depress, and then people in your house with less grip strength will complain.

That’s it. You can do this. Godspeed.

For my last job of the day yesterday my customer showed up late. I told him I was going to add a little to the bill for the time I spent waiting. He said, “Listen, I’m really sorry. If I’d known you were going to charge extra for tardiness I would have left the office earlier and gotten here on time.”

It’s quite common for managers of apartment buildings and condominiums to keep copies of all the unit keys on site. This is useful if a resident gets locked out or if there’s an emergency maintenance issue like a gas leak or a burst pipe when no one is home. Last week there was a break-in at the office of a large condominium complex in Sammamish and the keys to hundreds of units were stolen. The property managers hired a large locksmith company to resolve the problem, but they couldn’t come out for a week. Meanwhile, some thief had keys to all the residents’ apartments. I’ve been pretty busy rekeying locks for many of the folks who didn’t want to wait for the locksmith hired by the management company.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this. Once I did a bunch of work for a maid service company that had all its keys stolen and subsequently had to take responsibility for securing all of its clients’ houses. Another time a client who is a residential property manager had his laptop and a bunch of keys stolen from his home office. The keys were not labeled with their addresses but there was enough information in the laptop to figure out what address each key went to. We thought we were being overly cautious when we treated this like a five-alarm emergency, contacting all the tenants to quickly rekey their houses. But the one couple who was sluggish about scheduling with me saw their home burglarized.

If you’ve been entrusted to keep a lot of people’s keys, how do you store them? Are they in a proper safe or are they in a flimsy steel lockbox that can be pried open with ease? Are they labeled with the bare unit numbers are do you have a coding system that’s not easily decipherable? If all of the keys were stolen, how quickly could you secure all those homes, and what would it cost? Do you already have a plan in place? If these questions make you uncomfortable, it might mean that you need to get your house in order. And if the place that you live keeps a copy of the key to your home, you would not be unreasonable to ask some of these questions.

Last week I got a call from a customer in Bothell who was locked out of his house. I happened to be ahead of schedule so I agreed to squeeze him into my day. “Please get here as quickly as you can,” he said. Of course I would. I always drive like I’m late for my own wedding. This is one reason I leave my logo off of my van.

When I arrived at the house I encountered a pudgy bespectacled guy in his early twenties wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt. He looked a little like Drew Carey in the 1990s. A Tesla was sitting inside the open garage. He pointed to the door he wanted me to open. I asked him for ID. He pulled at both sides his gym shorts and shrugged, indicating he had nothing in that regard. I asked if he’d be able to prove that he lived there when we got in. “Yeah, sure,” he said.

Though he wanted me to go in through the garage, I took my regular walk around the outside of his house looking for the easiest way in. There were no open windows. All doors were deadbolted. I said to him, “I can see you didn’t accidentally let the door close behind you. This house was locked with a key. Did you lose your keys on a jog?” He responded vaguely, “Yeah, something like that.” I don’t like to pry, but the caginess bothered me a little.

I got to work picking the garage door deadbolt. It wasn’t an easy one. As I worked at it, he paced behind me and breathed loudly through a slightly congested nose. Sometimes it seemed like he was sighing impatiently. It was distracting. I turned to look at him and asked, “Have you got a pie in the oven?”

“Huh?”

“You asked me to hurry here and now you seem very anxious to get in.”

He gave me a crooked grin and said, “Oh, I just didn’t want to be waiting outside for a long time.”

I turned back toward the door and continued trying the deadbolt with my lock pick and tension wrench. He got back to pacing and wheezing behind me. But now it felt like he was closer to me and breathing louder. I was getting frustrated with the lock. I couldn’t seem to feel or hear any of the pins set. I became aware of the squeaking of his sneakers on the shiny garage floor. I was sweating. Agitation, annoyance, and discomfort are not especially conducive to good lockpicking. I took a long pause and a breath, hoping to reset. My glasses were fogging up so I took off my mask. I tried at the lock with a different pick. He continued pacing and breathing and squeaking. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned back to him.

“Have you got a copy of the key inside? I’m going to drill and replace the cylinder.” With a working key I would be able to match the new cylinder to it and it would be like nothing had happened. I don’t like using the drill and I especially don’t like doing so before residency has been proven, but I couldn’t take another second of the pacing and the breathing and the squeaking. And the looming! The looming was the worst part of it.

A few minutes later the door was open. Before I even stepped away from the door the customer was trying to squeeze past me to get in.

“Hold on,” I said, putting myself more squarely between him and the door. Before you do anything else, please grab your ID.

“Oh, I don’t have an ID,” he told me.

“What do you mean you don’t have ID?”

He shrugged, “I don’t.”

“OK. Are there any photos of you on wall in here?”

“No, I don’t take photos of myself.”

Sometimes confirming residency is not that straightforward and we have to employ some creative problem solving. “Do you have a Facebook page?” With that, plus a piece of mail he’d received at the house, I would be satisfied.

“No.”

“How are you going to show me that this is your house?”

He shifted from foot to foot, anxious for me to move out of the way so he could get into the house. “I have three computers in the bedroom upstairs. I can show you that I have the password to get into them.”

“That’s not enough,” I said. “I need to see photo ID. What adult doesn’t have photo ID? You have a house. You have a car in the garage. You must have ID.” Frequently when I’m going through this process people offer up what I consider to be unhelpful solutions. A common one is to start listing off the most expensive items in the home, which would be visible through windows or to anyone who has ever visited the house. Another is to offer to call someone I don’t know so they can confirm over the phone that this other person I don’t know should get into the house we’re standing outside. Had he not acted so strangely up to this point, I may have accepted the password thing.

“Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you. I can show you the computers.”

At this point I was getting pretty exasperated with the kid, and also nervous that he’d drawn me into something mischievous. I told him, “Look … you said you’d be able to show me that you lived here. I’m beginning to think I’ve helped you commit a crime by getting you into this house. I’m thinking about calling the police here.” I’ve only once called the police on a customer after helping her gain entry to a house, and that was because she refused to pay me. In this case I’d be calling the police on myself for breaking and entering, and I didn’t know what kind of trouble that would cause for me.

He paused for a long moment, looking at the floor. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wallet. Inside the wallet was a passport card with a photo of him looking uncomfortable.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s going on here?”

Then the corners of his mouth curled downward with emotion. “Here’s the thing. I’m really concerned about my privacy. Maybe it’s a little weird.”

“It’s not that weird. I get it. But you have to show me that you live here. Do you have a piece of mail you’ve received here?”

“I have a P.O. box.”

“Okay, if I check the King County Assessor’s website will I find that you’re the owner of this property?”

“I rent.”

“Do you get Amazon deliveries here?”

“No.”

“Is the Tesla out there registered to you? Does it have your address on the registration?”

“If it does, it would have my old address.”

“Look,” I said. “We have a problem here and I really need you to help come up with a solution.”

Another long pause. Then he gestured for me to follow him. We went into the kitchen and he pulled a folder from a kitchen drawer. Inside was a lease agreement that had his name on it and the address of the house.

It wasn’t too many minutes later that I’d fixed the lock to make it work with his old key and I was writing him a bill on one of my two-ply invoice sheets.

He said, “Hey, can you leave my name off that bill?”

“No problem. Here you go.”

He took it and said, “Would you mind if I paid you with a virtual credit card?”

“What’s that?”

He showed me his phone. On the screen there was an image of a credit card. “You can’t swipe it. You have to run the numbers. And I can put any name I want on it.” He could barely conceal how pleased he was with this explanation. I could barely conceal conceal my irritation.

“Hey, you know what’s pretty anonymous? Cash. Have you got any cash?”

As I walked back to my van I carefully inspected the bills he gave me. I was ready to put this weird job behind me and get on to the next one.

A few months ago I installed this latch protector on these double doors. The door on the left is always locked, so there was no concern about making it awkward to open and close that side. I found the part in a dusty old box in my shop and I thought it was a pretty elegant piece of hardware. I didn’t know where it came from and it was the first of its kind I ever installed. It covered the crack between the doors to protect the latch; it had a collar to protect the cylinder; and it had pins that seated into holes in the inactive door to prevent a burglar from spreading the doors far enough for the latch to come clear of the strikeplate so the door could open. I was also pleased with my own installation. The holes I drilled for the anti-spread pins were precisely placed and no larger than necessary for the pins to slide perfectly in without any rubbing as the door swung shut.

A few months after I installed this, and on the first warm sunny day of the year, the customer called me to say the door wasn’t closing all the way because the pins weren’t seating into their holes. I hadn’t accounted for how the aluminum doors would expand and contract in different temperatures, causing the pins to become misaligned with the holes. That was dumb. I went back and expanded the holes to fix my mistake. Next time I’ll know better, I thought to myself.

Upon further investigation, I find that this product has been discontinued and no manufacturer is currently offering one like it. After this minor adventure I can guess the reason that they make latch guards with anti-spread pins for steel doors but not for aluminum doors: aluminum expands too much in hot weather.

Upgrade from simple latch guard to full-door interlocking astragal. Just try and pry your way through that! On second thought, please don’t. Actually, forget I even mentioned it.