Locked out in
Bulwell?

Most of Bulwell was built in the sixty years after the war, and that decides what is on your door. The estates — Snape Wood, Hempshill Vale, Crabtree Farm and the rest — went up mainly through the 1960s and 1970s, brick-built two-storey terraces and semis. Houses that age are now on their second or third front door, which in practice means a uPVC or composite door with a euro cylinder through a multipoint mechanism.

That door type fails in two distinct ways, and they cost different money. If the key turns but the handle will not lift, or you are shouldering the door to get it to lock, the gearbox inside the mechanism has gone — a repair, not a new door. If the cylinder itself is the worry, the risk is snapping rather than picking, and a TS007 3-star cylinder is a ten-minute swap. Both prices are published before I set off.

The older core around the market is the exception. Bulwell was a market town long before the estates, and the older property nearer the centre can still have a timber front door. That is the one case where BS3621 is the standard your insurer actually means, because it is a mortice lock cut into a wooden door and it cannot be fitted to anything else.

Bulwell is inside the city and one of the shorter runs for me, so you are not paying for someone's drive across the county. Same fixed price as everywhere else, no call-out fee, and no mileage added on.