Grouped by property type — old stone and timber houses, mountain cabins and rentals, then city and village buildings by the river. Costs and scheduling sit in the FAQ below. Town rules are named so you can check them; none of this is legal advice.
Stone houses and the oldest doors
Our stone house still has a box lock screwed to the inside face of a plank door — can it go keyless without boring the door?
Often, yes, though not with the lock you have. A box lock, also called a rim lock, is a metal case fastened to the inside surface of the door with a bolt that shoots into a keeper on the frame. Smart deadbolts are designed for a round bore through the door and a hole in the edge, which a plank door with a box lock doesn't have. So the choice is between three routes, and only one of them involves a drill.
The first is to add a modern single-cylinder deadbolt to a secondary door and leave the historic one exactly as it is, used only with its key. The second, where the door already has a later deadbolt somewhere on it, is an interior retrofit unit that clamps over that deadbolt's thumb-turn and turns it by motor, with nothing new on the outside. The third is a surface-mounted electrified lock or keypad on the frame, which suits some doors but needs power and careful placement. Boring a new hole through original planks is the last resort, and we would rather tell you a door isn't a good candidate than cut it.
Whichever route you take, keep the box lock working. It is the one lock on the house that needs no batteries, and on a door that has survived a few hundred winters it is worth preserving as a key-operated backup.
Is it wiser to leave the original front door untouched and put the smart lock on the kitchen-wing door instead?
In many Ulster stone houses that is exactly what we recommend. These houses were usually extended: a frame kitchen wing in the nineteenth century, a mudroom or a back porch in the twentieth. The door in the newer part is typically a standard thickness, already bored for a deadbolt, closer to the driveway and the door the family really uses. Fitting the smart lock there gives you every convenience without touching the oldest fabric of the house.
The front door then becomes the formal door, locked from inside and opened with its key on the rare occasions it is used. That arrangement is common in houses where the front door faces a road that has grown busier than the builders imagined, and it keeps the historic face of the house unchanged for anyone walking past.
Just make sure the wing door is solid, with a strike screwed into framing and a light outside; a smart lock on a hollow-core back door is a poor trade.
How do you fasten a keypad or a bridge to a stone wall without damaging the masonry?
By not fastening into the stone itself. Old fieldstone and early brick are irregular and often soft, and a hole in the face of a stone is permanent. Where something has to be mounted on masonry — a remote keypad beside a recessed door, a weatherproof box, a bridge on an inside wall — we fix into the mortar joints, which can be repointed later, or onto a small wooden or composite backer that is itself held by a few joint fixings. Removing it later leaves a joint to point, not a scarred stone.
Inside, the better answer is often to avoid the wall altogether. A plug-in bridge can sit on a shelf or a window reveal near the door, and a hub can go in an adjacent frame partition instead of the stone gable. We test the signal at the spot before choosing it, because a two-foot stone wall can weaken a radio link more than the distance alone suggests.
If any wiring is needed, it runs along mouldings or through the frame of a later partition, not chased into the masonry. Lime mortar and old stone are not materials to experiment on with a hammer drill.
Can a Dutch door, split into top and bottom halves, take a smart lock?
Yes, if the two halves are dealt with as one door. A Dutch door is cut across the middle so the top can open for light and air while the bottom stays shut — Philipse Manor Hall's guide describes them as keeping children in and farm animals out. Most have a bolt or latch that locks the top leaf to the bottom one, and a lock only on the bottom half. A smart lock usually goes on the bottom leaf, where the original lock or latch sits.
The weak spot is the top half. If it can be opened from outside while the bottom is locked, the smart lock protects nothing. So we check that the top leaf has a secure bolt to the bottom leaf or to the frame, operated from inside, and we show you the routine for closing up: top bolted first, then the bottom locked by keypad or app. A door sensor on the top leaf can tell you if it is left open.
Hudson Valley owners are rightly proud of their Dutch doors and their black-painted iron hardware. On an original one we would use an interior retrofit or a secondary door before boring the leaf, just as with a plank door.
Mountain cabins, family camps and rental cottages
Guests reach our cabin near Phoenicia with no phone signal — what should they use to open the door?
A keypad code they were given before they left home. Many smart locks can open with a phone app over Bluetooth, but the app often needs a data connection to download or confirm the guest's digital key, and in the Phoenicia and Shandaken ZIP codes that Hudson Valley One flagged for dead zones, the guest's phone may have nothing at the porch. A numeric code stored in the lock needs no signal at all. It is the credential every cabin should rely on.
How the code gets to the lock depends on whether the cabin has internet. With Wi-Fi in the house, the owner creates a per-stay code in the app from anywhere and it syncs to the lock. With no internet, some locks generate time-limited codes offline from a shared formula, so the app can issue a guest a code valid for their dates without the lock ever going online; the alternative is to programme a rotating set of codes in person and change them on a schedule. Send the code and the arrival instructions by email or text before the guest leaves an area with coverage.
Hosts on the national forums often keep a lockbox with a physical key as a backup in case a keypad fails. If you do, put it somewhere out of sight, change its combination between stays, and tell the local host where it is. A dead keypad in a valley with no signal is the one situation where a key really matters.
Three siblings share the family camp — can each household keep its own codes private from the others?
Yes, and it avoids a lot of friction. Most current smart lock apps let one owner invite others with different roles: full administrators, who can add and remove users, and ordinary users or guests, who can only open the door. For a camp shared among siblings, the cleanest setup is one administrator per household, each managing codes for their own children, friends and guests, plus a short written agreement on who removes access when someone stops using the place.
Check how a given app handles visibility before buying. In some, every administrator sees every code and the full entry log; in others, codes are hidden once created. If privacy between families matters, choose a lock whose app lets each person see only what they created, or use a lock with enough user slots to give each household a block of codes they manage themselves.
We set the roles up with everyone present, or by video call for whoever can't make the drive.
Woodstock asks for a local host within ten miles — what should that person be able to do at the door?
Everything you could do if you were there. The Town of Woodstock's 2019 short-term rental law requires a non-owner-occupied rental to name a designated host — an adult living within ten miles who can deal promptly with emergencies and renter issues in the owner's absence — and it makes the owner and the host responsible for addressing renter issues within 24 hours. A host who can't get through the door can't do any of that.
In practice the host should have their own permanent code, not a shared one, so their visits are logged separately from guests and cleaners. They should know how to open the lock with its key if the electronics fail, where the spare batteries are, and how to reset the lock or swap its batteries. If the lock is connected, give them a user account in the app so they can issue or cancel a code when a guest is stuck, but keep administrator rights with the owner.
The same law asks for a safety and egress plan posted in the unit and on the back of each bedroom door. Make sure the plan's route out matches how the locks actually work: every door on the way out should open from inside by hand, with no code, which is how we fit them.
Can the sliding glass door onto our deck be put on the same keyless system?
Sometimes, but sliders are their own category. Smart deadbolts are made for hinged doors, and most patio sliders have a thin mortise latch in the edge of the panel with no room for one. People do try retrofit gadgets on the inside handle; a thread on a home-automation forum described one that was strong enough to unlock but not strong enough to lock, which is the wrong way round for a door that faces the woods.
The dependable options are a purpose-built keyless lock for sliding doors from a maker that lists your door type, a mechanical push-button lock with no batteries, or simply treating the slider as an exit-only door: locked from inside with its own latch plus a secondary bar or foot bolt, and never used for entry. For most cabins we recommend the last, with the smart lock on a hinged door nearby.
If you want to know when the slider is open, a contact sensor on the panel will tell you, and it can tie into the same app as the main lock. That gives you the alert without asking a sliding latch to do a deadbolt's job.
If the house is empty and the alarm goes off, how does the volunteer fire company get through a smart-locked door?
The same way they would through any locked door, unless you plan otherwise — and in a rural house that can mean forcing the door. Two plans avoid that. The first is a fire-department key box. Knox's residential HomeBox holds a single key, and the master keys are controlled by the local fire department, so only authorised crews can open it. Ask your fire company whether it runs a Knox program before buying one; not every volunteer department does.
The second is a responder code: a dedicated code you give to your alarm monitoring company or your caretaker to pass on in an emergency, which you change afterwards. It works only if someone can relay it, so it complements the key box rather than replacing it.
Either way, write the plan down where your caretaker and alarm company can find it, and keep the physical key that matches your smart lock. A key in a fire department box is useless if it is the key to the lock you replaced last summer.
Ulster sees a lot of summer thunderstorms — can lightning take out a smart lock or its bridge?
The lock itself rarely, its connection more often. A battery-powered deadbolt on a door has no wire to the house, so a surge has no easy path into it. What does get hit is everything plugged into the wall: the router, the modem, a plug-in bridge or a hub. Earth Networks' lightning report for 2020 counted 182,760 lightning pulses in Ulster County and 49 thunder days, so this isn't hypothetical, and in June 2024 the Times Union reported more than 35,000 Central Hudson customers in Ulster, Dutchess and northeastern Orange reporting outages after one round of storms.
When a surge or an outage takes out the network, a well-chosen lock keeps working at the door: codes, keys and fingerprints all operate locally. What you lose is remote control and notifications until the network comes back. Plug the router and any bridge into a surge-protected strip or a small battery backup, and expect to re-pair a bridge after a replacement router is installed, because a new router usually means a new network name or password.
If a storm has knocked out your lock's connection and you're out of the area, our setup-only visit reconnects bridges, re-pairs locks and checks every code without changing any hardware.
Kingston, New Paltz and the river towns
Our Uptown Kingston building has a shop on the ground floor and apartments above — should they share one entry system?
They can share hardware, but never credentials. In many Stockade-area buildings the shop door opens straight onto Wall Street or North Front Street while the residential door sits beside it and leads up a shared stair. The shop needs codes for employees that work during trading hours and change when staff leave; the tenants need codes that work at all hours and are theirs alone. Putting both on one keypad or one list invites mistakes — a former shop employee who can still open the residential stair is the classic one.
The cleaner design is two doors, two locks and two user lists, even if both use the same brand and app so the owner manages them in one place. If both doors are on a small access control system, the shop group and the residents' group are set up separately, with schedules on the shop side only.
Remember too that Kingston's rental registration rules apply to the apartments: the city requires owners to register rental units and obtain a rental permit, and an owner who does not live in Ulster County must name a managing agent. That agent should hold the administrator role for the residential door.
We rent a house near SUNY New Paltz to a new group of students each year — does a smart lock beat re-keying between leases?
Usually, over a few years. SUNY New Paltz lists more than 6,100 undergraduates and about 1,000 graduate students, and a good share of them live off campus in houses let by the room or as a group. Every June, keys walk away with departing tenants, get copied, or are never returned. Re-keying or replacing cylinders each year is a recurring cost, and it relies on the landlord remembering to do it before the new group moves in.
With a keypad lock, each tenant gets their own code that ends on the last day of the lease. When the lease ends, those codes stop working without anyone touching the lock, and the incoming group's codes start on their move-in date. You still keep a mechanical key for the lock, held by you, and you still give tenants the access the law and the lease entitle them to.
Two cautions. The Village of New Paltz registers and inspects rental homes, so check that the doors and locks you choose will satisfy the inspector, especially on bedroom doors and exits. And individual codes are only private if tenants keep them that way; remind them that their code is theirs, not the house's.
Our New Paltz shop hires students who leave every May — what is the quickest way to manage staff codes through each semester?
Give every employee their own code with an end date, and do the paperwork at hiring rather than at departure. When a student starts in September, create their code with an expiry just after the end of the spring term; if they stay on for summer, extend it. Nobody has to remember to delete anyone in May, because the codes simply stop.
Set opening and closing staff on schedules that match your hours, so a code that worked at 7 a.m. for the opening shift doesn't open the door at midnight. A lock or keypad with an audit trail shows you which code opened the door and when, which helps with cash discrepancies and with that one shift nobody remembers working.
If you have more than a handful of staff or more than one door, a small access control system with fobs may be quicker to manage than a keypad lock, because fobs can be collected and reissued. We can price both for the same storefront.
Our manufactured home's door swings outward — can it still take a smart deadbolt?
Usually, with some care. Many manufactured homes have outswing entry doors, which open toward you as you stand outside. A standard smart deadbolt can be fitted to an outswing door as long as the door is thick enough and has room for the bore, but the hinge pins are on the outside, so the door's security depends partly on non-removable or security hinge pins, which we check and can fit.
The frame is the bigger question. Manufactured-home door frames are often light, and a deadbolt is only as strong as what its strike screws into. We reinforce the strike, use long screws into whatever framing is behind it, and make sure the door closes fully against its weatherstrip so the bolt lines up without straining the motor.
Some owners choose a keypad lever or a keypad deadbolt designed for thinner doors instead. We measure the door's thickness and backset at the walkthrough and recommend a model that is listed for it, rather than forcing one that isn't.
