Atlanta Doors and Locks, done at the frame.

Atlanta proper is the densest mix of buildings we work in. Midtown and Downtown along Peachtree Street are office towers with building-standard suite doors and ground-floor retail behind aluminum storefront doors that cycle thousands of times a week. The tower's property manager owns the door problem: closers that slam or fail to latch, pivots worn until the door drags, a suite that needs a reader for after-hours access, and a rekey at every tenant turnover, cut inside the building's master key system so the engineer's key still works. We do that work on the building's schedule and put every door on its own line of the estimate.

The Westside is a different building. The brick warehouses along Howell Mill Road and Marietta Street were built for freight, and many of them now hold restaurants, breweries and offices while others still ship. Either way the personnel door beside the dock is hollow metal in a frame that has rusted at the bottom, with a closer that no longer pulls it shut, and the openings in a converted building are rarely a standard size. We measure the opening rather than order from a chart, and on a restaurant the back door onto the alley gets an exit device and a closer that latches, because the door that is propped open is the door that gets walked through.

East of Downtown the houses are older than almost anything else in the metro. Grant Park, Inman Park, Cabbagetown, Kirkwood and Candler Park are Victorians and Craftsman bungalows from the 1890s to the 1920s, with wood entry doors in jambs that have moved for a century and deadbolts bored in decades after the door was hung. A new entry door here means a frame that is out of square and a threshold that may be rotted under the paint, so it is measured and checked before it is ordered. Several of these neighborhoods sit inside Atlanta's historic districts, where a street-facing change on a contributing house can need review; we check the district guidance before an entry door is ordered, not after.

Apartment buildings run through all of Atlanta, from Midtown high-rises to garden apartments off Ponce de Leon and converted lofts on the Westside, and they are where doors, locks and security meet. Stairwell and corridor doors are fire-rated and need their label, a closer that latches them and the annual inspection; the buzzer panel at the entry is usually half dead and gets replaced with a video intercom wired to the new door release; cameras go at the entry, the mail room and the garage; and every unit is rekeyed at turnover. A property manager can put a whole building on one schedule with us and get a written estimate per door. Atlanta is the middle of where we work, so same-day service is more often possible here than at the edges of the metro.