A key and lock calendar for the whole year

Most lock trouble does not arrive out of nowhere. A key that has been stiff for three weeks fails on the coldest morning of the winter. A gate padlock that rusted quietly all summer seizes on the first day of hunting season. A keypad battery that has been dim since August gives out on the night guests arrive. The pattern is plain once you see it: locks and keys wear on a schedule set by weather, travel and household habit, so the care they need can be put on a schedule too.

This guide walks through a North State year and hangs small jobs on each stretch of it. None of the jobs is large. Most take a few minutes with a screwdriver, a clean cloth and a pencil. The point is to catch the slow problems while they are still slow, because a lock that is merely annoying in March tends to be a lockout in December.

Our valley towns and our mountain towns do not share a calendar. Redding and Anderson run hot and dry through summer, while Mount Shasta, McCloud and Dunsmuir see snow and long cold stretches. Read the months below as a template and slide them a few weeks to fit where you live. Someone in Yreka may need the winter jobs sooner than someone in Cottonwood, and a cabin owner near Lakehead may be juggling two calendars at once.

Deep winter is when marginal locks show themselves. Metal cylinders contract, old grease thickens, and any moisture inside a keyway can freeze into a small plug of ice. If a key has felt a little rough since autumn, this is the month it refuses to turn. Pay attention to which door gives trouble first, because that door is telling you something about wear, alignment or moisture, and the answer is rarely the same for every lock in the house.

Walk through the logic of a cold morning before it happens. Keep a spare key somewhere warm and inside, not in a vehicle that is also locked. Know which door you would use if the front deadbolt sticks. Our guides on winter lockouts and frozen locks and on a deadbolt that sticks only in the cold explain what is happening inside the cylinder and what to avoid doing, such as forcing a key or pouring hot water into a lock.

This is also a good time to look at the weatherstripping and the swell of the door itself. Wood absorbs damp from snow and rain, and a door that shifts a sixteenth of an inch can leave the bolt rubbing the edge of the strike. If you notice the latch dragging or the door needing a shoulder to close, write it down now and sort it out when the weather allows, rather than leaning on the key harder each day.

• Test every exterior key in its lock once, in the cold, before the worst weather arrives.
• Keep one spare key inside the house, away from the vehicle it opens.
• Clear snow and ice from the keyhole area before you insert the key, never after.
• Note any door that needs a push to latch, and plan an alignment fix for spring.

When the thaw comes, the lock problems change character. Water that froze in the keyway turns back to liquid and carries grit with it. Dirt driveways turn to mud, and keys that ride in a pocket next to muddy boots pick up fine abrasive dust that wears both the key and the pins. A gentle cleaning in early spring pays for itself over several seasons.

Use this stretch for the first real inspection of the year. Look at each exterior deadbolt and see whether the bolt extends fully and smoothly. Check that the strike plate screws are tight and have not worked loose through winter movement of the frame. Look over any padlock that sat outdoors for months, because corrosion on a shackle often begins where you cannot see it. The notes in mud season and keys and lock lubricants, what helps and what hurts cover the cleaning and lubrication questions in more detail.

If a cabin or second home sat empty for the cold months, the spring opening is part of this chapter too. Go through the property on a calm day with a checklist and a pair of work gloves. Our guide on reopening a cabin in spring suggests an order that keeps you from missing the shed, the gate and the little outbuilding that always gets forgotten.

Late spring is when traffic through your doors changes. Graduations, weddings, family visits, new tenants and summer workers all mean more hands on more keys. This is a natural time to count what is out there. Make a short list of every key you have handed to someone, with the name beside it and the date, and look at it honestly. Keys that were lent for one project often stay in a pocket long after the project ends.

A tidy key list is also the moment to ask whether rekeying would be simpler than chasing every copy. A rekey changes the internal pin arrangement so that old keys stop working and new ones take over, without replacing the lock itself. The decision between that and a full replacement is laid out in rekeying or replacing, a decision walk through, and our team can talk it over through the request form on the contact page.

Think about the people who are new to your keys, too. A teenager with a first job and a first set of house keys needs more than a hand off. A short talk about where keys live, what never goes on a tag and what to do after losing one saves a lot of trouble. We wrote teaching teens to look after keys for exactly that conversation.

Valley heat does odd things to hardware. Metal parts expand, door frames shift, and a lock that felt perfect in April can begin to bind in July. Painted surfaces swell a hair, plastic keypad housings warm and soften, and a key left on a dashboard can reach temperatures that are hard on the fob inside it. Heat also dries out lubricants and invites dust into the places where grease used to be.

Summer is therefore a good month to check how doors sit in their frames and to notice any that rub. The explanations in why locks stick in hot summer weather and why a door binds in summer heat help you separate a lock problem from a door problem, which matters because the fix is different for each.

Summer is also the season of lake days, river trips and campsites, which are hard on keys in a different way. Keys fall out of pockets, get soaked, go through the wash or sink off the edge of a dock. Decide in advance where keys travel when you are on the water or on a trail, and keep a spare at home that does not depend on the one you are carrying. The ideas in carrying keys while hiking, fishing and boating are easy to adopt before the first long weekend.

September pulls the household back into routine, and it is a sensible time for the preparedness jobs that are easy to put off. The dry season in much of the region means smoke and evacuation notices are a possibility some years, and a household that has thought about keys ahead of time moves more calmly than one that has not. That thinking is not complicated. It comes down to knowing where the keys live, which ones you would take, and who else can reach the house.

Set up a small go bag or a labeled pouch that holds the essentials: house key, vehicle key, any gate or outbuilding key, and a card that tells a trusted person where the rest are kept. Our notes on a wildfire season go bag describe what belongs in it and why. If smoke or ash has settled on keypads and door hardware, a gentle cleaning matters, and the page about ash and smoke damage to locks and keypads covers what is safe to do.

Back to school and back to work also mean new schedules for who is home when. Look over who has a key, who knows a code and who has the spare. Codes should change when the circle of people changes, and a keypad that has had the same code since the day it was installed is a quiet risk in almost any home.

Autumn is the season to repeat the February test while the weather is still kind. Try each key in each lock and pay attention to feel. A key that turns with a faint grinding, or needs to be wiggled, is a candidate for a fresh copy cut from the original, or for a closer look at the cylinder before winter makes the problem worse. Waiting until it fails in a snowstorm leaves you with the fewest and hardest options.

This is also the time to winterize anything seasonal. A cabin that will be closed for months deserves a deliberate routine for locks, shutters, gate chains and stored keys, and our checklist on winterizing a cabin is built to be printed and ticked off. Padlocks on woodsheds, gates and trailers should be cleaned and lubricated before the cold arrives, and any with visible corrosion are worth replacing now.

Battery powered hardware belongs on the autumn list as well. Cold weather reduces what a battery can deliver, and a keypad that works fine in September may stutter in January. Replace batteries on a schedule instead of waiting for the warning light, and keep a mechanical key for each electronic lock. The guide on battery failure in electronic locks explains the warning signs, and the habit of changing batteries when the clocks change is an easy one to remember.

December is the busiest month for keys. Guests arrive, relatives stay over, packages sit on porches, and many households leave town for a week or more. A house that is sometimes occupied and sometimes not has a different set of needs than one lived in day to day. Before you go, think about the doors people forget, such as the garage entry, a sliding door or a side gate, and ask a trusted neighbor to keep an eye out without handing out more keys than you need to.

The checklist in locking up before holiday travel is a short walk around the property that takes less time than most people expect. It leans on simple habits rather than gadgets, such as keeping lights on timers and making sure no spare key is hidden under the doormat or a flowerpot.

If you are the host, think about how guests will get in and out. Give visitors a key that you can account for, and take it back when they leave. If your door is operated by a code, set a temporary code for the stay and delete it afterward. Snow and ice can also catch visitors unaware, so clear the entrance, and be sure someone knows how to open the door if a key snaps in the cold. A broken key is much easier to handle when it is dealt with calmly and early.

Some of the most important lock tasks have nothing to do with the season. A move, a sale, a divorce, a new roommate, a departing employee or a lost key sets off its own clock. The right response is almost always to treat the event as the trigger and the calendar as the backup. When the life change happens, decide who holds keys now, which locks need to change and what to write down.

Moving into a place is a perfect example. Previous owners, tenants, contractors and cleaners may all have held keys, and you have no way to know how many copies exist. Reading your first day in a new home, a lock checklist before you unpack the first box makes the first week much easier. The same logic applies when a rental turns over or a workplace changes staff.

When in doubt, call us. Our branded team arrives in uniforms with a service van carrying professional tools, key cutting and programming equipment and common hardware, and can rekey, repair or install what the situation calls for. We serve Redding, Mount Shasta and the communities between and around them, and you can describe the job through the request form.

The easiest way to make this guide work is to turn it into a single sheet of paper. Write the twelve months down the side and put two or three jobs beside each, using the lists above as raw material. Add your own: the day the cabin closes, the week the hunting camp opens, the date the lease renews, the month the fleet inspection falls due. Pin it where you will see it, or keep a copy in the glove box or the shop office.

Keep the tone modest. This is not a security overhaul, and nobody needs a spreadsheet of every key. A calendar earns its keep because it asks one small question at a regular interval: does everything still work the way it did last time? When the answer is no, you have caught the problem on your own terms, with an open afternoon and a clear head, instead of at night in a parking lot with a dead phone.

Finally, revisit the calendar once a year, and change it when your life changes. A new baby, a retirement, a second property or a new business all move the dates around. For the broader picture of a house and its doors, take a look at a home security walkthrough, lock edition, and for the details on spares, see storing spare keys safely.