By Paul Bianchina
If you are fortunate enough to have a house with a basement - or if you are planning one in the future - you know that they can be a real blessing in the quest for extra living and storage space. Properly done, basements can offer a wide range of possibilities, from exercise rooms to home offices to a playroom that the kids can really call home.
One of the problems with a basement is often how to provide safe and convenient access from the outside. Exterior accesses make sense from the standpoint of convenient accessibility, but many people give up on wrestling with old wooden doors that are heavy and extremely difficult to weatherproof.
If you'd like to get a little more use out of your basement, it might be time to consider some new exterior doors. Prefabricated basement access doors and enclosures are a far cry from their site-built wooden predecessors, offering easy operation, secure locking and complete weather protection. And because they offer a wide, straight-in access to the basement, moving large furniture and storage items gets a whole lot easier.
Retrofitting Doors
Exterior basement access door assemblies consist of three basic elements - a concrete well outside the doorway that holds back the dirt, provides an enclosure for the stairs, and provides a base for the doors; sidewalls, that sit on top of the concrete well and provide a frame for the doors; and the doors themselves.
In a retrofit situation where you are replacing old doors, the first step is to examine the condition and suitability of the well itself. You need to determine if it is in good enough condition to receive the new doors, if the top is flat, smooth and structurally sound, and if the well extends above the surrounding grade sufficiently to provide adequate water protection. You also need to measure the overall width and length of the well at the top to make sure it's going to work with the new doors.
Next comes the sidewalls. Sidewalls form a right triangle when viewed from the side, and attach to the top of the well walls and the side of the house. The top slopes away from the house, and provides the points of attachment for the doors themselves. As with the well, you'll want to look carefully at the condition of these wall structures - which may be concrete, concrete block, or even wood - to see if they are solid and in good enough condition to accept the doors.
If the sidewalls are in bad shape, your best bet is to remove them completely, down to the top of the well, and replace them with new steel ones. Steel sidewalls, which are available from the same manufacturers that make the doors, offer several advantages - they're solid and secure, weather-tight, consistently angled, and designed to work with the new doors to greatly simplify your installation. It's similar to the difference between trying to fit a new door to an old, rotted, out of square set of jambs as opposed to installing a new pre-hung unit where the door, frame, and weather-stripping are all new and designed to be compatible with one another.
The last element are the doors themselves. The new basement doors are steel, with all steel hinges and locking mechanisms, and seal against one another in the middle to prevent air and moisture intrusion. All doors feature easy-open and easy-close hardware, which is balanced to make it easy to lift the door open and to then close it without having it slam down. Most doors have a stay-open feature that locks the door in the open position for safety, and you can also add a key lock from the outside for additional security. Of course, the doors also have release hardware that allow them to be opened from inside as well.
New Construction
If you are considering adding a basement to your new home, providing an exterior access is easy. Once the excavation is done and the basement walls are poured, you can install a prefabricated concrete well that greatly simplifies the whole process. The well is precast in the proper height, width, and length, and the entire stairwell is cast into it as well. A crane swings the unit into place, it is bolted against the house and sealed, and after backfilling is complete the new steel sidewalls and doors are installed on top.
Some lumber yards and door companies can help you with ordering basement doors, sidewalls, and precast wells, or can direct you to the right sources. One of the major manufacturers of basement doors is the Bilco Company.
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