Duluth Doors and Locks, storefronts to warehouses.

Pleasant Hill Road at I-85 is one of the busiest retail corridors in Gwinnett, and Duluth's share of it is strip centers, freestanding restaurants and the plazas around the Gwinnett Place area, with a large Korean-owned restaurant and retail community running along Pleasant Hill Road and down Buford Highway. Most of these buildings went up in the 1980s and 90s, and their aluminum storefront doors have cycled all day, every day, since. The pivots wear, the closer slams and then stops latching, the glass gets replaced more than once, and the fix is nearly always the hardware rather than a new door. The back door gets an exit device that locks from outside and opens from inside, the register and the back door get a camera, and a rekey follows every manager who leaves.

Off both sides of I-85 Duluth is warehouses and flex space: Satellite Boulevard, Old Peachtree Road, Steve Reynolds Boulevard, Boggs Road and the stretch of Buford Highway between them. The personnel door beside the dock is hollow metal in a frame that rusts at the base where forklift traffic and rain meet, the closer has given up, and the exit device has been propped or bypassed by someone in a hurry. A single-tenant building wants a keyed-alike system and a reader between the office and the floor; a multi-tenant flex building wants a master key system with a landlord master and each tenant keyed to their own suite, planned on paper before a cylinder is cut, and cameras over the docks and the yard that the owner can pull up on a phone.

The houses in Duluth are newer than intown Atlanta's, and it shows in the work. The subdivisions off Sugarloaf Parkway, Peachtree Industrial Boulevard and Old Peachtree Road, and around Berkeley Lake, were built from the 1980s through the 2000s, mostly two-story traditionals with fiberglass or steel entry doors, hollow-core interior doors and builder-grade deadbolts. Twenty to thirty-five years in, the frame is usually sound and the door and hardware are not: the weatherstripping is gone, the hinges have sagged, the deadbolt sticks, and the keys have been copied for every contractor and house-sitter since the house was built. A move-in rekey, a keypad deadbolt, a new entry door in a frame that does not need replacing, and a camera at the driveway are the common calls, and each is usually a short visit.

Duluth's own downtown is a different scale: Main Street and the Town Green, older storefronts beside newer mixed-use buildings, and the townhome and apartment communities that have gone up around them. The apartment buildings bring the usual set, fire-rated stairwell doors that need their label, a closer and the annual inspection, an intercom at the entry, a camera at the mail room, a rekey at every turnover. Duluth and Lawrenceville are the eastern end of where we work regularly, so a same-day visit here depends on where the day started; the free written estimate does not.