Old houses and the cold
A new old house on a Biar slope: which locks come first
Biar’s old town climbs in narrow, steep streets to a thirteenth-century castle. If you have just bought, or been handed the keys to, a house on one of them, these are the doors and locks to deal with in the first week, and the ones that can wait.
Biar sits at 697 metres, the highest of the towns we cover. Its old town is a tangle of narrow, steep streets running up to the castle, with the old gateways of San Roque and Jesús still standing. Houses there change hands like anywhere else, and not every buyer is local: in 2022, 25 of Biar’s residents had been born in the United Kingdom.
What they buy is usually an old house with several doors, a mixed collection of locks and a bunch of keys whose history nobody knows. This is how to sort it out.
Week one: who else has a key?
Nobody can tell you how many keys to a house exist. Previous owners, their children, a cleaner, a neighbour who watered the plants, the estate agent, the builder who did the bathroom: all of them may have had one, and keys are rarely returned.
The answer is not new locks. It is new cylinders in the locks you have, on every door that opens from outside. The doors, handles and lock bodies stay; only the part the key turns in is replaced, and every key that comes with the new cylinders is handed to you. It is a booked job, not an emergency, and on most houses it takes a single visit.
Count the doors
Village houses on a slope often have more ways in than you notice on the first visit:
- The front door on the street.
- A lower or upper door on another street, which steep plots sometimes have.
- A door to a yard or terrace, often with an old lock nobody uses.
- A garage or store at street level.
Walk round, try every key on every door, and write down which opens what. Any door with no key at all is either opened and fitted with a cylinder, or properly fixed shut.
What can wait
- An old box lock that works. If it turns, keep it. It is part of the house.
- A stiff cylinder on a door you rarely use. Note it; it can be done with the rest.
- The look of the front door. If the house is in the old town, ask the town hall before changing anything on the façade. A modern cylinder can usually be added to an old door without changing how it looks from the street.
Before the first winter
Biar is the coldest of the six towns we cover; in exceptional years it has had 30 cm of snow. Outdoor locks and the doors themselves move with the cold, and a door that closes easily in September may bind in January. Our guide on frost and the lock explains what to do on a frozen morning. Houses on slopes have the same settling problems we see in Villena’s El Rabal.
Reaching a house on the old streets
Some of the old streets are too narrow for a van, and the last stretch may be on foot. When you book, name the nearest square or the church, and send a pin. If the house is outside the village, our guide on directions in the campo applies too.