About Ritson Door Hardware Co.
The call that started this business was a stairwell door in a Simcoe Street apartment block, held shut with a length of rope because the closer had been off the wall for two years and the superintendent had run out of ideas. Nobody wanted the job. It was too small for a hardware contractor and too specialised for the handyman who had already tried.
Ritson Door Hardware Co. does the small, specialised job. Closers, exit devices, hold-opens, floor springs and the pivots and strikes that decide whether a door latches — nothing else, all day. In Oshawa that means three quite different worlds. Plant and supplier buildings along Thornton Road South and out in Northwood Business Park, where a personnel door in the separation between plant and office cycles more in a week than an office door does in a year. The rental houses around the Ontario Tech and Durham College campuses, licensed by the City, where a self-closing device quietly unhooked during a bedroom retrofit becomes a licensing problem and not just a safety one. And the institutional door count — Lakeridge Health, the two campuses, the arenas and both school boards — where panic hardware, cross-corridor magnets and barrier-free operators all turn up inside the same building.
We would rather come once in October than three times in February. Half the emergency calls we take in the deep freeze are doors that had been closing a little slower every week since Thanksgiving and nobody looked. Every job, planned or urgent, is quoted in writing with the scope fixed before a screwdriver comes out — and when a closer only needs adjusting, that is what we tell you and that is what we bill for.
Why Oshawa property owners trust us
- One trade only: closers, exit devices, hold-opens and operators
- Rated doors done building-wide, with a written record for your fire safety plan
- As comfortable in a plant or a warehouse as in a lobby
- Licensed rental properties documented opening by opening
- Insured, WSIB-covered, with the workmanship guaranteed in writing
Insured & WSIB-covered
Liability insurance and WSIB coverage are in place on every Oshawa job, and the certificates go to whoever needs them for the file. There is no Ontario trade licence for door hardware to hold, so we do not claim one. The measure we work to is simpler and harder than a licence: does the rated door close and latch, unaided, in the season it actually has to do it in?