Stellenberg locksmith — where your ceiling is also your neighbour's.

In some developments yes, in others no, and it is worth checking rather than assuming either way. Where a party wall stops at ceiling height rather than continuing to the underside of the roof, the void runs on above several units. Lift your manhole, take a torch and look — if you can see continuous space past your own boundary, that is what you have.

As an individual owner, secure your own ceiling access hatch, which is quick and inexpensive. Beyond that it is a construction question rather than a hardware one, so it belongs with the trustees and possibly with a building professional. We can tell you what we can see, and we will not overstate what a lock can do about a structural condition.

The front door and the patio slider, in that order — and the slider is usually the one nobody has ever looked at. A townhouse is a much simpler proposition than a freestanding house, and concentrating on those two is genuinely most of the job. Everything else on a unit is either communal or not a realistic route.

Plenty of the sliders builders hang in these schemes will come out that way, and the absence of any damage is exactly why the entry gets read as something else entirely. Preventing it is inexpensive — an anti-lift fitting and nothing more. What matters is the implication: if yours lifts, so does every matching door in the development, which puts it squarely in front of the trustees rather than in front of one owner.

It never catches up, and it usually ends with several units collecting post from a box that no longer locks. Doing the whole bank at once, to a single sensible keying scheme with the keys written down, costs less than the accumulated one-at-a-time replacements and finally makes the situation knowable for the trustees.

Because unit numbering inside a scheme almost never corresponds to the road outside. A locksmith can be at the correct street number and still be several minutes and one boom away from your door. The development name plus your unit number removes that entirely, and where there is a guardhouse we can start the clearance while somebody is still driving.

Your own front door, yes. The communal fittings are different: vehicle gate, pedestrian gates, the postbox bank, any shared store. Those are the scheme's property and touching them reaches every owner in it, so they wait on a trustee resolution. If we notice a fault on something shared while attending your unit, you will get it in writing to hand on.

The communal hardware, checked on a schedule rather than after complaints. Entrance gates, pedestrian gates and postbox banks all went in when the development was built, so they reach the end of their working lives at roughly the same time. Getting them looked at periodically is unglamorous and it prevents most of what schemes end up dealing with as emergencies.