A house changes hands with a small mystery attached: nobody can tell you how many keys to it exist. The sellers hand over what they have, which is the honest count of keys they know about. The copies made for a college kid home for summers, a former house cleaner, a neighbor who watered plants in 2019, are not in that count, and cannot be.
The fix is not complicated, but it competes for attention with movers, utilities, and a hundred boxes. This checklist orders the lock work for a new house in Monroe so the security items land in the first week, while the nice-to-haves wait their turn.
The checklist, in order
- Rekey or replace every exterior lock, including the door from the garage into the house.
- Test every lock from both sides, door open and door closed, and note any that bind.
- Check that every exterior door has a deadbolt, not only a locking knob.
- Look at the strike plates: the screws holding them should be long enough to reach the wall framing, typically around three inches, not the short screws that often ship with hardware.
- Walk the house at dusk and note doors or gates a stranger could reach unobserved, especially side and rear entries under no lighting.
- Decide the key plan: who holds copies, where the spare lives, and how many copies to cut now.
- Check sliding doors and windows on the ground floor for working locks and, on sliders, a secondary block in the track.
- Save the locksmith's number in your phone before you need it at midnight.
Why the garage entry door tops the list
The door between the garage and the kitchen is the most commonly skipped lock in a move, because it feels like an interior door. It is not. Garages get opened by remotes, codes, and service doors, and a garage code from the previous owner may still be live on the keypad outside. Treat that door as a front door: rekey it with the rest, and reset the opener codes in the same week. In newer Monroe subdivisions and older in-town houses alike, this door is the soft spot precisely because nobody thinks about it.
The five-minute strike plate upgrade
While the rekey is being scheduled, look at your strike plates with a screwdriver in hand. The plate is the metal piece in the door frame that the bolt enters. Force against a door concentrates there, and the difference between a plate held by short screws into soft trim and one anchored by long screws into the stud behind the frame is the difference between a door that flexes and a door that holds. Swapping screws is a five-minute job per door, needs no skill beyond a drill, and is the single cheapest meaningful upgrade in home lock security.
Check the hinges the same way while you are there. On out-swinging doors, hinge pins should not be removable from outside. Most residential doors in this area swing inward, but side doors and older homes hold exceptions.
Keys: make the plan while it is easy
Cut spares during the rekey visit, from the new key, and write the plan down: two for the household, one with a named person nearby, and none under a mat, above a lintel, or in a fake rock, which are the first three places anyone looks. If the house has locks from the same maker, ask about keying them alike so one key runs the whole house. That single decision removes most of the daily friction that makes people lazy about locking up, and lazy locking is how most opportunistic entries happen in quiet Union County neighborhoods: not through a picked lock, but through a door left open because the right key was never handy.
Common questions
Is rekeying enough, or should a new owner replace the locks?
Rekeying is enough when the hardware is in good shape, because the security question at a move is who holds keys, and a rekey answers it completely. Replace locks that are worn, damaged, or knob-only.
How many exterior locks does a typical house have?
Usually three to five once you count the garage entry door and any side or rear doors. Count them before calling so the quote and the visit cover the whole house in one trip.
What about the garage door keypad code?
Reset it the same week. The previous owner's code, and any codes they shared, stay active until you clear them, and the keypad is an entry point just as much as a keyed lock is.
Photos in this guide are representative stock images.
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