The council’s own planning report calls the Sagrado Corazón scheme the most important housing development of its period in Aspe: 51 houses, built in 1957, and most of them still keep their original form, a single-family house with a garden in front. Plenty of other houses in town are of a similar age.
If yours is one of them, the front door may be the original. The question is whether the lock is.
How to tell how old your lock is
Look at the key. A long key with a round shaft and a flat “flag” at the end (the old llave de gorja) belongs to a lever mortice lock, the kind fitted in that period. A short flat key that slides into a round barrel belongs to a cylinder, which was almost certainly added later.
Look at the edge of the door. Open it and look at the metal plate on its edge. An old mortice lock usually has a plain plate with one bolt and a latch. Newer locks have a slimmer plate, sometimes with several bolts.
Listen to it. A lever lock that has worked for decades can feel loose and clunky. That is not a reason to replace it in itself; a sudden change in how it feels is.
Keep it or replace it?
An old lever lock in good order is not automatically insecure, but it has two weaknesses: nobody knows how many keys exist, and the keys themselves are hard to replace if lost. A worn one also starts to fail in a particular way, with the key turning further than it should before the bolt moves.
The usual choices are:
- repair the old lock if the mechanism is sound and you want to keep the door as it is;
- replace the lock body with a modern mortice lock that takes a euro cylinder, fitted into the same pocket in the door where possible;
- add a second lock with a cylinder above the old one, leaving the original in place.
Before anyone quotes for a cylinder, it helps to know its size: the guide on measuring a euro cylinder shows how.
If the house came to you through an inheritance and the keys are missing altogether, start with an inherited house with no keys.