Locksmith in Stittsville, from Main Street to the newest subdivisions

Stittsville got its first post office in 1854, with Jackson Stitt as postmaster, and for more than a century it was a farming and railway village in Goulbourn Township. Much of it was destroyed in the Great Fire of August 1870, and the village was rebuilt.

The turning point came in the late 1970s, when the council decided to connect the village to municipal water and sewer. Once service arrived in the 1980s, development followed fast. The population, about 3,000 in the 1970s, had quadrupled by 2000, and Stittsville joined Ottawa with the rest of Goulbourn in 2001. Jackson Trails, begun in 2005, was Canada's first Energy Star community.

That timing explains the locksmith work here, and it is why a Stittsville locksmith spends far more time on modern hardware than on antiques. A handful of older houses and businesses line Main Street, but most of Stittsville was built from the 1980s onward, with modern doors, attached garages and, increasingly, keypad and smart locks. Around the edges, farms and rural lots add outbuildings, gates and padlocks.

Stittsville's Main Street mixes older buildings with new plazas, and its shops, restaurants, clinics and offices bring a steady flow of commercial lock work. Older storefronts may have doors and hardware that have been adapted many times; newer plazas have aluminum storefront doors with narrow lock bodies.

The calls are the familiar ones: a cylinder that has worn until the key barely turns, a back exit door that no longer latches, a staff member who left with a key, a safe whose combination left with a manager. Each is usually solved in one visit.

For a business with several staff, a simple master key system pays for itself quickly. Each person gets the keys they need, the owner has one key for everything, and a lost key means rekeying a few doors rather than all of them. The commercial locksmith page explains how it works.

You get a price on the phone once the job is described, and it is confirmed before work starts. Nothing is added without asking.

Most Stittsville homes are quick to work on, with modern hardware from one maker, so a full rekey of a newer house is usually a short visit. Costs rise with the number of locks, with high-security or keypad hardware, and with outbuildings and gates on rural properties that add to the list.

Night and weekend calls cost more than booked visits, and rural addresses well outside the village can carry a travel charge. You will hear about either on the phone.