If you misplaced your house keys or lost them, you might be wondering if someone out there has found them and might be planning on breaking it with the keys. So if you lose your house keys, don’t panic, and don’t change locks just yet. Because you never know where your key might be. Perhaps a loved one left the house and unintentionally took the keys with them.
Perhaps you dropped off the key at your workplace or where you went for coffee. But chances are, your keys might be sitting idle at someplace you kept them and just waiting to be picked up, but you cannot remember where. We’ve all been there. We’ve all had times when we overthink and sometimes forget to remember tiny details such as where we kept the house key.
But don’t worry, this article will help you figure out just what to do if you lost your house keys and you’re planning on changing locks.
Read: What Should You Do If You Lose Your House Keys
Relax and think
One of the first things you want to do is take a few minutes and think about where your keys might be or where you might’ve lost them. They might be right inside of your purse or bag, or at the back of your jeans, or inside of your car, or maybe you dropped them off at your neighbour’s place. Firstly, try to remember where you might’ve lost them and look for them.
Taking these few minutes to think clearly and hard about where your keys might be might be a vital factor in determining whether to change locks or not. If you think long and hard about where you might’ve lost the keys, you might recall where you lost them and eventually find them. If you’re able to find them, it means you don’t have to change your house locks.
Read: What do I do if I locked myself out of my house
Rekeying
Okay, so you’ve spent minutes, maybe hours thinking about where you might’ve lost your house key but despite all your guesses, you still couldn’t do them, that’s okay. Now the next thing you should consider is REKEYING your keys instead of changing your locks. If you’ve been the same lock for years and you’re already used to it, then you wouldn’t want to change it for another.
Rekeying means changing the algorithm on your lock so you can use a different key to open it. It’s that simple. Instead of changing your entire lock, all you have to do is hire a locksmith to rekey your lock and hand over a set of new keys to you.
This is one of the best ways to guarantee your safety as well as save you some money. In ensuring your safety, even if a bad person finds your lost keys elsewhere, they cannot use those same keys to open your house lock because it has been rekeyed. Only the new keys given to you by your locksmith can open the door.
And for saving you a considerate amount of money, in the UK for instance, locksmiths charge higher for changing a lock and charge less for rekeying a lock. So if you’re calling out a locksmith to have your locks replaced completely, they’re going to charge you more than if you hire a locksmith to have your locks rekeyed.
The labour involved in changing a lock is far more than the work involved in rekeying a lock.
Might as well change it
Now you know what rekeying is and what it means, but if you still feel like changing your lock after losing your keys, then it’s not a bad thing either. Also, there is higher security in changing your locks than having your locks rekeyed.
If your house door is an expensive one, that means the lock is going to be expensive as well. Which also means that a locksmith is going to charge you more than the usual fee to have it changed for brand new ones. Which, in turn, gives you a new lock and a set of new keys.
Depending on how long the distance, and the time of day, your locksmith will also consider these when determining the final cost of the job.
Read: Can You Rekey a Lock Yourself
Conclusion
If you lost your house keys, whether you chose to change your lock or not is entirely up to you. Some people live in well-secured estates and streets that lose their locks every time. What they do afterwards is to get new keys. Not rekeying, not changing, they remake the key, as long as they have a spare.
So if you lose your house key and you have a spare, you could have the key re-made. As long as no evildoer has any intentions of using your lost key to enter your house, then there’s nothing to worry about. For further consideration and before taking any action, do follow the above methods to ensure you don’t make a hasty decision.
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