Emergency Carpentry London: Board-Up and Door Repair

A break-in is not a carpentry job in the way a wardrobe is a carpentry job. Nobody is choosing a moulding profile at eleven at night. There is a door that no longer closes, a hallway that is open to the street, and a decision to make in the next hour about how the property gets through until morning. This is what that hour looks like, in the order it actually happens.

What Board-Up Actually Means

A board-up is a make-safe. It closes and weatherproofs an opening that can no longer be closed by the door itself. In practice that means 18mm exterior-grade ply cut to the opening and fixed back to sound timber — the frame if the frame survived, the reveal or the lining if it did not — using security screws that cannot be backed out with an ordinary driver. Where the leaf is intact and only the lock has failed, the board can sometimes be reduced to a plated repair over the strike area rather than sheeting the whole opening.

What it is not is a repair. A boarded door is a closed hole. It does not lock in any meaningful sense, it will not pass a fire door inspection, and it is not something to live behind for a fortnight. It buys you the night and the following working day, which is exactly what it is for.

Cost is driven by three things, and none of them is the ply. The first is the hour — an out-of-hours attendance costs more than the same work at two in the afternoon, and Emergency Repairs London charges a £60 call-out at any hour with labour from £110 an hour in the daytime, from £140 an hour in the evening, and from £180 an hour overnight. The second is the size of the opening: a single timber front door is one sheet, a shopfront or a pair of garden doors is several, and glazed panels beside the door often have to be boarded too. The third is whether anything structural has moved, because a frame that has been pulled out of the reveal has to be packed and re-fixed before a board can be screwed to it at all.

What Forced Entry Does, In Order

Forced entry fails predictably, and knowing the order tells you what you are about to pay for. The lock is the first thing to go, then the frame on the strike side, then the leaf. Damage usually stops at the first component that gives, which is why so many break-ins leave a perfectly good door hanging on a destroyed frame.

The lock. On UPVC and composite doors the classic failure is a snapped euro cylinder: the cylinder is gripped and broken at its central waist, the cam is turned directly, and the door opens with no other damage at all. On a timber door with a nightlatch, the usual method is levering the latch back or splitting the timber around the keep. In both cases the lock itself is the cheapest part of the job — an anti-snap TS007 3-star cylinder runs £95–£165 supplied and fitted, a BS3621 nightlatch £85–£140, and a five-lever mortice deadlock £130–£220.

The frame. This is where the money is. A kicked door concentrates the whole force onto the keep or the striking plate, and softwood frames in Victorian and Edwardian terraces across Camden, Hackney, Islington and Lambeth split along the grain from the keep upwards. Sometimes the split is a clean one that can be glued, clamped and reinforced with a London bar or a full-height strike plate. Sometimes the jamb is broken through and has to be cut out and spliced, or the frame replaced entirely. You cannot tell which from a photograph — it needs a chisel and a look at how far the split runs.

The leaf. Doors give last, and when they do it is usually a panel door failing at a stile-to-panel joint, or a composite door delaminating around the lock case. A leaf that has moved on its hinges but is otherwise sound is a re-hang and alignment job, £140–£260. A leaf that has broken is a replacement, and the price then depends entirely on whether it is a stock size or has to be made.

Temporary vs Permanent Repair

Boarding is enough when the frame is sound, the leaf is sound, and only the lock or the ironmongery has failed. In that case the board is often skipped entirely: the right cylinder or mortice is fitted on the first visit and the door works again before the engineer leaves. That is the cheapest possible outcome after a break-in and it is more common than people expect, particularly on snapped cylinders.

The frame has to be replaced when the jamb is split through its full thickness at the keep, when the frame has been pulled away from the brickwork and the fixings have torn out of the reveal, or when repeated repairs have left nothing solid to screw a new keep into. A spliced repair is legitimate carpentry and holds well on a clean split, but it relies on there being sound timber above and below the damage to splice into. Where there is not, splicing just moves the weak point.

The honest rule is this: if the door can be made to lock into solid timber that is properly fixed to the structure, repair it. If the security of the door depends on screws going into split or crushed wood, replace it. A repair that looks fine and fails at the next attempt is worse than no repair, because you will have told your insurer the property was secured.

Insurance: What to Photograph First

Photograph before you touch anything. Once the board goes on, the original damage is behind 18mm of ply and cannot be re-created. Take four sets: the door and frame from outside showing the whole opening in context; a close-up of the failed lock, cylinder or keep so the failure mode is legible; the frame damage with something for scale so the split length is clear; and the interior of the property showing the disturbance before anything is tidied.

Report the burglary before you call anyone else. Dial 999 if you think the intruder may still be there, and 101 or the Metropolitan Police's online reporting route if the burglary has clearly finished. The crime reference number is the first thing an insurer asks for, and no claim proceeds without it. If the police intend to attend for forensics, they will tell you on the call — in that case the board-up waits for them, and the make-safe becomes a matter of staying in the property or arranging a temporary alternative.

Two policy points matter here. The first is the condition, present in effectively every UK home policy, requiring the policyholder to take reasonable steps to prevent further loss. A board-up is the textbook discharge of that duty, which is why it usually belongs inside the claim rather than beside it. The second is the lock specification on the reinstatement. Many policies define the standard of lock the property must have — commonly BS3621 for mortice locks and nightlatches on timber doors, and TS007 3-star or Sold Secure Diamond for euro cylinders on UPVC and composite doors. Fitting something cheaper can affect cover at the next incident.

Ask for the ratings in writing. Every lock fitted on an ERL break-in job is listed on the job sheet with its BS3621, TS007 or Sold Secure rating, because that document is what the insurer reads. Keep the board-up job sheet and the permanent repair invoice separate — they are different stages of the same claim and are easier to evidence apart.

Communal Doors and Flats

A shared door changes who can say yes. The communal entrance door of a converted house or a purpose-built block is part of the common parts, so it belongs to the freeholder and is managed in practice by the managing agent, with the cost recovered through the service charge or the building's own insurance policy. A leaseholder cannot authorise a permanent change to it — not a new lock, not a new access control panel, not a different door.

Emergency make-safe is treated differently in practice, because leaving a block open to the street overnight is nobody's preferred outcome. Most agents will accept a board-up carried out out of hours and reconciled the next working day, particularly where the alternative is an unsecured entrance to eight flats. What they will not accept is a leaseholder unilaterally re-keying a communal door, because every other resident then cannot get in.

Your own flat entrance door is usually demised to you under the lease, so the lock is yours to change — but in a block that door is very likely a fire door, and that constrains the repair. Under the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, responsible persons in buildings above 11 metres must carry out annual checks of flat entrance doors and quarterly checks of communal fire doors. A door that has been forced and then patched with whatever was on the van will fail that check. If your flat entrance door is a certified FD30S assembly, the replacement has to be a certified assembly too, with the correct intumescent strips, cold-smoke seals, self-closer and hinges — not a stock door cut to fit.

Tell whoever attends that it is a fire door before they start. It is a different order, a different lead time, and a different price, and it is much cheaper to know at the board-up stage than after a door has already been hung.

What We Do On Arrival, and How Fast

Dispatch gives you a real ETA on the call, based on the engineer actually being sent. The target is 60 minutes across zones 1–3. The outer boroughs — Bromley, Croydon, Hillingdon, Havering — run 75 to 90 minutes overnight, and you will be told that on the phone rather than after the hour has passed.

On arrival the sequence is fixed. The opening is assessed and photographed as found, so there is a second independent record alongside yours. The property is checked to confirm it is clear and that no other point of entry has been left open — a forced front door is often not the only thing that was tried. The opening is then boarded with exterior-grade ply and security screws, or, where the frame and leaf are sound, the lock is replaced there and then and the board is never needed.

Before the engineer leaves you get a written job sheet: what was found, what was done, what is still outstanding, and the rating of any lock fitted. That sheet is your make-safe evidence. The permanent repair — new locks, frame repair or replacement, re-hang and alignment — is normally booked for within 24 hours, once the frame has been measured properly in daylight and the right ironmongery is on the van.

FAQs

The structured questions above cover the six things people ask most in the first hour after a break-in: who to call first, whether we can attend tonight, what insurers cover, what lock standard they expect, who authorises a communal door, and how long the permanent repair takes.

If your door will not close right now, call Emergency Repairs London on 0207 046 1363 or WhatsApp 07456 975436. Board-up and emergency door work runs 24 hours a day across all 32 boroughs. Report the burglary to the police first, photograph the damage before anyone touches it, then get the property closed.