Locksmith in Dunkeld, Randburg

Dunkeld has a lot of corner stands, and a corner stand is a different animal from a mid-block one in a way that almost nobody accounts for. A house between two neighbours has one public edge. A house on a corner has two, which means twice the wall, twice the pavement, twice the passing traffic and — on a great many of these properties — a second gate that was put in decades ago and has not been thought about since. On a corner stand, name the road as well as the number: locksmith near me explains the difference.

What happens on a corner is entirely predictable. One frontage becomes the address: it has the number on it, the drive, the entrance everybody uses, and it gets the attention and the money. The other becomes the side, which is a curious word for something that faces a public road. The side frontage gets the older wall, the garden gate, the service entrance, the delivery gate that stopped being used when the kitchen was moved, and no attention at all. Anything in Dunkeld that turns into car locksmith work is handled by the same crew at the same hours.

The correction is not complicated. On a corner stand there is no side — there are two fronts, and both should be walked, counted and fitted on the same basis. In practice that usually means bringing one gate up to the standard of another and dealing with one or two openings that have been quietly forgotten for years, which is ordinary lock repair rather than anything structural.

The second gate is the recurring one, and its condition is remarkably consistent. It was the tradesman's entrance, or the way to the old kitchen, or simply the gate onto the quieter road, and it stopped being used at some point in the last thirty years. It has since carried the same fitting through every renovation the house has had, on a boundary that faces a public street, and the household long ago stopped seeing it.

Second is the length of the wall itself. Twice the public boundary means twice as much of it out of sight of the house, and corner properties routinely have a stretch of wall along the quieter road that is visible from no window at all. That is not a crisis, but it is worth knowing which stretch it is, because it is where anything unhurried would happen.

Third is the ordinary consequence of large old properties on generous stands: outbuildings, garaging, a staff wing, a garden store, sometimes a second garage opening onto the other road. Each of those was fitted for the job it had when it was built and most have quietly changed jobs since. Counting them honestly is the useful part of a first visit here, and it usually takes longer than the work does.

The habit worth breaking is the language. Households on corner stands talk about the front and the side, and that word does the damage, because it describes a boundary onto a public road as though it were the gap between two houses. Once you stop calling it the side and start calling it the second frontage, the right decisions follow more or less automatically and most of them turn out to be inexpensive.

Practically, that means walking both roads. Stand on each pavement in turn and look at your own property the way somebody passing would — what is visible, what is reachable, which gate is which, and what is on it. On these stands the second walk almost always turns up a gate that has not been opened in years and is still standing between a public street and the garden on a fitting nobody has looked at.

Then decide what the disused openings are for. A gate that will never be used again can be properly closed for very little. A gate that is occasionally handy should be brought up to the standard of the main one, since it opens onto the same kind of public road. Either is a small job, and doing them together with a single lock change at the same visit is cheaper than dealing with them one at a time over the next five years.