Marietta Doors and Locks, the Square to East Cobb.

Marietta's Square is the oldest commercial block we work on. Glover Park is ringed by storefronts from the 1800s and early 1900s, now restaurants, shops and offices, and the streets off it, Kennesaw Avenue, Church Street and Whitlock Avenue, hold houses that go back before the Civil War. The Square and those streets sit inside the city's historic districts, and a change to a street-facing storefront or entry door on a contributing building can need design review before it happens. We check the guidance before a storefront or entry door is ordered, and a like-for-like replacement in the same opening is usually the straightforward path.

The doors themselves are as old as the buildings. A storefront on the Square is often wood and glass in a masonry opening that was never square, or an aluminum retrofit from the 1970s squeezed into it, and a house on Kennesaw Avenue has an original entry door with a transom above and sidelights beside, a deadbolt bored through it decades later. We measure the opening and the door separately, because in Marietta they rarely agree, and a security door on a Victorian porch is chosen so it belongs there. A restaurant around the Square gets the same treatment as one anywhere: an exit device on the back door, a closer that latches it, and a rekey when a manager leaves.

East Cobb is the other Marietta, and it is where most of the houses are: 1970s and 80s colonials, ranches and split-levels off Johnson Ferry Road, Lower Roswell Road and Sandy Plains Road. The entry door is original steel or wood with the weatherstripping gone, the interior doors are hollow, and the deadbolts were added later. The frames have settled with the houses, so a new entry door is hung plumb in the old frame or the frame is replaced with it, and a move-in rekey that makes every old key dead the same visit is the first job on a house that just changed hands.

Along I-75 Marietta is industrial. The parks off Franklin Gateway, Delk Road, Cobb Parkway and Airport Road are warehouses and flex space with hollow metal personnel doors beside the docks, frames rusted through at the bottom, closers that no longer latch and exit doors that somebody chained after hours. A multi-tenant building gets a master key system planned on paper before a cylinder is cut, a fob reader between the office side and the floor, and cameras over the docks and the yard. The medical offices around Kennestone, and the apartment buildings across the city, add fire-rated corridor and stairwell doors that need their label, a working closer and the annual inspection. Every job in Marietta, old or new, starts with a free written estimate and is same-day when the schedule allows.