Anonymous wrote:When my neighbors told me they had the key.

The normal thing would have been for the neighbors to give you the key, not tell you they had it, and later you could decide for yourselves which neighbors to give your key to for emergencies.

I never changed mine. I always intended to but the locks are just really old and hard to replace, and the people who lived here before were here for 30 years and really old and moved into assisted living right afterward. They encouraged us to change the locks because they had made copies for people over the years, but the risk is just not worth the process of getting a new lock.

Anonymous wrote:We didn't move in to the house for about 3 weeks after closing so that we could have a little work done. We gave the contractors the keys to the lock that came with the house. We changed it within a couple of days of moving in. You have no idea who else has the key when you're buying a house from someone. We had someone come over and do it - 10 minutes and maybe a couple hundred dollars.

I’m not handy but changing a deadbolt is really really easy.

I recommend Kwikset locks so you can easily key them yourselves all the same, as well as easily re-key if you lose the keys.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Never did it. We've been here five years. Maybe if I thought the previous owners were sketchy I'd have done something like that, but they were boring middle-aged parents like ourselves and it just wasn't something we gave a thought to.

We did it because the sellers handed us a gallon sized ziplock bag of keys. Each door had two different keys, plus the shed, random doors, duplicate sets. I prefer to have every lock keyed the same. And we wanted keypad on a door so we don’t have to carry keys if we go out for a short walk.

Haha, omg that was us. Not to mention some doors had double cylinder locks which meant we had to dig through that bag of keys to unlock the door from the INSIDE.

We have keypad now for housekeeping and handymen.

We’re on our 4th house. Never changed them.

Before we moved in.

Day 1

I still have the house keys to my childhood home. Parents sold that house in 1998. No clue if the new owners changed the locks.

* on our new house.

We've been in our house 20years. Bought as young adults who had no idea what they were doing, so changing the lock never occurred to us. Over the years, I've thought about it, but we've had to replace several doors already and the only original doors have a glass screen door on them that can't be unlocked from outside. We've not seen any evidence of anyone tampering with it. We'll be moving soon and will be changing the locks ASAP.

I think we changed locks before we started moving stuff in. I didn't have any reason to suspect the previous owners but who knows who they gave a key to? Housecleaners, pet sitters etc. Better safe than sorry.

We didn't move in to the house for about 3 weeks after closing so that we could have a little work done. We gave the contractors the keys to the lock that came with the house. We changed it within a couple of days of moving in. You have no idea who else has the key when you're buying a house from someone. We had someone come over and do it - 10 minutes and maybe a couple hundred dollars.

Day 1. When selling, you simply have no control of who has access to the key and it really takes 10 minutes to copy it and you don’t know who had the key over the years before buying the property.

Wow I don't think this occurred to me.

We've been here 17 years. We did install an alarm right away though, and it gets set every night as well as when everyone is gone from the house.

The front door is the only original door anyone could come in though. We have done extensive renovations over the years and the kitchen door is now moved so a different door and same with the basement. Garage door is also totally different though that never had a key.

We literally drove from closing (at the seller's bokerage office) to the house and changed the locks right then.

This was last year--a house we bought for our college students to live in (we have two kids that go to the same college--real estate in this town is much cheaper than the DC area.)

Within a week we changed all of the locks for every door to be operable with the same key. This included the garage door the patio doors the back doors the front doors, etc. We also added deadbolt locks for enhanced security purposes.