Egress Window Installation Process
Initial Consultation
Our initial homeowner consultation includes a thorough assessment of your home. We’ll look at the basement space you want to remodel and what you want to use that space for. We’ll discuss the types of furniture arrangements and window coverings you envision in your new space. We’ll talk about how to calculate the potential increase in your home’s value when you add usable square footage.
Our consultation looks at your home’s orientation to the morning and afternoon sun and considers drainage around your home. We’ll discuss the type of egress window best suited to your needs, as well as your options for egress window wells and window well covers.
You’ll learn how we excavate and install your new egress window in just one day using our innovative, proprietary techniques. We’ll help you select the best value window options for your particular needs, and we’ll show you how we’ve redesigned the installation process to make your egress window safer, more energy efficient, and less susceptible to rot and damage over time.
Preparation
To facilitate the speedy installation of your basement egress window, we ask that you clear furniture and blinds from around the window prior to our crews’ arrival. The small section of your basement around the window will be enclosed in a plastic sheet to minimize the mess.
Brighter Basements uses equipment specially designed to make your basement egress window installation efficient and non-disruptive. We will protect your landscaping and pathways to the full extent possible using tarps and plywood.
We make a point of being considerate of your neighbors during our installation process. If it is impossible to install your basement egress window without encroaching on a neighbor’s property, we will only do so with their permission, and we will leave virtually zero evidence of our presence when the job is complete.
Excavation
Unlike other egress window installers, Brighter Basements does not perform the difficult work of excavation using unskilled day laborers. Most companies spend a full day on excavation, because they still excavate by hand. At Brighter Basements your excavation will be handled by the owner and his regular staff using tools specifically designed to make this time-consuming, labor-intensive task more efficient and economical. We typically have the hole for your egress window excavated in 2-3 hours.
Concrete Cutting
Once the hole is excavated and secured, we begin to cut the hole in your foundation. Our skilled installers use concrete cutting saws to enlarge the opening in your foundation wall. All the cutting is done from the outside, and while the egress window well process is noisy and wet, most of the mess remains on the outside of the wall. The block of concrete from the opening (typically 800 pounds worth) is carefully removed and hauled away for disposal.
Window Installation
Brighter Basements has pioneered innovative egress window well installation techniques for your basement windows that improve the structural stability of the installation, increase the amount of glass relative to the opening, and improve the long-term wear of the window framing.
Unlike most installers of basement egress windows, Brighter Basements frames the window opening with steel rather than wood. This ensures that your egress window opening is now the strongest part of your foundation wall rather than the weakest. Because the steel framing is so much thinner than the wood 2x8s used by other egress window installers, you’ll get a larger area of glass relative to the size of the opening in your foundation wall. And of course, steel framing is not susceptible to termites, mold or rot.
Your egress window will be set in place in the opening, and the edges will be sealed with a high-quality, weather-resistant industrial glass sealing gasket rather than caulk, which dries and deteriorates quickly in Colorado’s dry environment.
Window Well Installation
The most important aspect of your egress window well installation is maintaining positive drainage of moisture away from the foundation. To ensure proper drainage Brighter Basements carefully tamps down the backfilled dirt around your well and installs 9-12” of rock in the floor of the hole below the level of the window sill.