Sandy Springs Doors and Locks, Perimeter to Roswell Rd.

The Sandy Springs side of Perimeter Center is office towers along Peachtree Dunwoody Road, Hammond Drive and Mount Vernon Highway, and in a tower the door belongs to the building even when the tenant lives with it. Suite entry doors are building-standard, so the work is the hardware: lever sets and closers, an electric strike and a fob reader where a tenant wants after-hours access to their own suite, and a rekey at every turnover cut inside the building's master key system so the engineer's key still opens every door. We work with the property manager on that and give the tenant a door that locks the way they expect.

South of the towers is Pill Hill, the hospitals and medical office buildings along Johnson Ferry Road and Peachtree Dunwoody Road, and a doctor's suite is its own kind of door. Exam room and corridor doors need lever hardware and closers that do not slam, the records and supply rooms are keyed separately from the suite entry with the office manager holding the only master, the back office gets a keypad, and the reception desk gets a camera. The key system is planned on paper before a single cylinder is cut, and the visit is booked around the practice's schedule where ours allows.

Roswell Road is the spine of Sandy Springs, and most of it is strip retail from the 1970s and 80s: freestanding stores, restaurants and small offices behind aluminum storefront doors whose pivots and closers are decades past their design life. The door slams, then sags, then stops latching, and the fix is nearly always the hardware rather than the door. The back door onto the parking lot gets an exit device that locks from outside and opens from inside, and a shop that loses a manager gets rekeyed the same week instead of wondering who still has a key. The older condo buildings along the same road have the common-door problems of any apartment building: a worn buzzer panel, stairwell fire doors that no longer latch, and a garage nobody can see.

Behind all of that are the houses, and Sandy Springs is largely ranches, split-levels and two-story colonials from the 1960s through the 80s, in the neighborhoods off Mount Vernon Highway, Spalding Drive and Johnson Ferry Road. The entry door is often original, the deadbolt was added later by someone with a spade bit, the interior doors are hollow, and the frame has settled with the house. A new entry door gets hung plumb in that frame or the frame gets replaced with it, a steel security door is chosen to suit the house rather than a warehouse, and a camera at the driveway is set up on the owner's phone. Houses change hands often here, and a move-in rekey that makes every old key dead the same visit is the first call a new Sandy Springs owner should make.