We decided to wait to change the locks on our DC house until after all the contractors were done, so after the window guys finished up last week, I figured I'd take care of that. All the exterior doors on the new house have standard single- or double-cylinder deadbolts and keyed doorknobs, but oddly I've never worked with these before; all of my experience changing out lock cylinders prior to this has been with mortise cylinders, which are more or less the standard in the steel security doors that grace most New York City apartments. (Embarrassingly, we actually never got around to changing the locks on our Brookline apartment!)

I spoke with our local DC hardware store (actually more of a locksmith that also sells basic tools and whatnot), and they said that they could re-key the cylinders from the deadbolts and doorknobs for $10 each, way cheaper than buying new equipment. Happily, getting at the cylinders in these kinds of deadbolts is totally simple, at least in my Schlage ones; it involves removing the outer and inner assemblies from the door, and then removing a single screw on the back of each assembly which holds the cylinders in. It was easy enough that I figured I could take the cylinders out of the keyed doorknobs as well, but quickly learned that that wasn't quite as simple. (If you look at the picture, all those pins and springs shouldn't be liberated from the mechanism!) Oops. I decided to just take all the other doorknobs to the locksmith intact. After a few hours, I had ten newly-rekeyed cylinders to install back into my doors.

The nice thing about changing all the locks is that we moved from two different keys (one for the front of the house, another for the back) to one key for everything. Now, I just need to install a new deadbolt on one of the exterior doors and replace two inside-door locks to which we weren't given keys by the seller, and we'll be all done.