Long-term parking at Orlando Sanford International fills up with cars whose owners are somewhere over the Atlantic. A key ring goes into a carry-on, a fob battery dies during two weeks sitting in a lot, or the person with the spare set never made the trip this time. We get calls from that parking structure and the surface lots around it, and the car has to unlock and start before the trip home actually starts.
Sanford isn't only an airport town, though. Goldsboro, Georgetown and Mellonville sit under oak canopies with houses that were built before commercial flight existed, the Riverwalk and downtown pull a crowd well into the evening thanks to a cluster of craft breweries, and Seminole State College and the newer subdivisions add a completely different housing stock on the other side of town. We work all of it, sometimes in the same week, sometimes in the same afternoon.
A car locked in long-term parking at Orlando Sanford International is a different job than a driveway lockout. The vehicle has usually been sitting for days, the owner is often jet-lagged, and there's no spare on hand because it's a state away. We get in without damaging the door or window seal, then cut or program a replacement key right at the vehicle, not back at a shop counter across town.
Some of these calls come from someone who parked at the airport, flew out, and lost the only key somewhere along the way -- a rental counter, a hotel room, a beach a thousand miles from Sanford. Getting them back into their own car in the lot is the whole job; getting them a new set programmed to that car is the rest of it.
Not every Sanford call is airport-related. The Central Florida Zoo and the marina along the Riverwalk both draw a steady stream of visitors, and a family that spent the afternoon there sometimes finds the car keys are locked inside when it's time to leave. It's a shorter, simpler version of the airport problem -- a parking lot lockout, not a lost key -- but it's a category of its own once you count how many people pass through those two spots on a given weekend.
These are some of the oldest residential streets in Seminole County, and the hardware reflects it. Doors have been rehung, repainted and re-cased over a century of ownership changes, leaving backsets that don't match anything on a hardware store shelf and mortise locks never meant to pair with a modern strike plate. We rekey by matching the old case on-site rather than defaulting to whatever deadbolt happens to be on the truck that day.
A house in Mellonville or Georgetown that's changed hands three or four times often has a lock history to match -- a mortise cylinder from one decade, a replacement strike plate from another, a door that no longer closes quite square. We work with that history instead of tearing it out.
Sanford's downtown doesn't empty out at five o'clock. The marina, the Riverwalk and a run of craft breweries near First Street keep pulling people in well past dark, and storefront and patio-gate hardware gets used on a schedule that looks nothing like a typical retail block. A tap room locked out of its own storeroom an hour before last call is ordinary work for us, not an exception we have to schedule around.
West and north of the historic core, Sanford looks like most of the rest of the metro: subdivisions built long after the historic districts, contractor-grade knobs still on the door from closing, new owners who want the locks changed before they've finished unpacking. That's a rekey, not a hardware upgrade. The lock itself is fine; the number of people still holding a working key is the actual problem.
We cover both Sanford ZIP codes, from the airport corridor to the historic districts and the newer subdivisions beyond them.
Sanford runs from a working international airport to streets laid out before Florida had paved roads, and the work looks different depending on which end of town the call comes from. Whether it's a car in long-term parking, a mortise lock in Georgetown, or a tap room locked out before close, call (407) 792-1378.
