Last Saturday around lunchtime we were called to a flat in Leeds city centre to change what was described as a faulty lock. When we arrived on site to take a look the lock was smashed to bits and so was the door and the door frame! The customer said he had come home in the early hours of the morning and lost the keys after a night out and thought it would be too expensive to call a
locksmith out at that time in the morning. All the flat doors in this particular block of flats are solid fire doors with a oak veneer with a in layed pattern around the edge (in other words expensive!). We changed the lock and did a tempory repair to the door and door frame as the damage was too bad to do a permanent repair. The damaged on this occasion was so severe it will need a new door and frame and as the flat is rented it will have to be put back exactly the same as before, we estimate that the price would be about £1000 as we imagine the door will have to be specially made to match the rest of the other flat doors. If the customer had called us first even at that time in the morning it would have only cost him about a 10th of that price to open and change the lock with no damage to the door what so ever. It would of probably been quicker also to call us than kick the door in as the customer said it took about 45 minutes to get the door open, at that time of day with no traffic we could have arrived at the flat in about 10 minutes as it was not far from us.
