Egress windows, basement windows and basement doors in Calgary

Fitting windows and doors to Calgary walls

Ask what basement window or door a Calgary house should get and the first honest answer is: when was it built? The city grew outward in rings over about a hundred years, and each ring left a different wall behind. In the oldest communities — Inglewood, Hillhurst, Sunnyside, Kensington, Bridgeland — the foundation may be rubble, brick or concrete poured before anyone put steel in it, and two houses on one street can differ. On those walls we look first and choose later. The condition of the wall decides how big a window it can reasonably take, what the frame has to be fastened to, and whether a door opening is worth pursuing at all.

Move out to the bungalows of the 1940s through the early 1960s — Mount Pleasant, Killarney, Altadore, and what is left of the original houses in Bankview and Crescent Heights — and the usual find is a thinner poured wall with little reinforcement and a basement ceiling lower than today’s. That low ceiling squeezes the window from both ends: the unit has to be tall enough to give a real clear opening, yet its sill still has to sit no more than 1.5 m above the finished floor. A casement that swings fully open often earns its place here over a slider that loses half its width to the fixed pane. From the 1970s onward the walls are commonly poured and reinforced, and suburban and lake-community homes since the 1990s add ICF. On those, the window or door choice is mostly about the room, and the harder part is getting equipment past a fence, a deck and mature landscaping.

Then there is what sits outside the wall. Across much of the north and east, clay holds moisture against the foundation, so a new egress window is only as good as the well drain beneath it; without one the well fills and the window becomes the leak. Communities on the flats beside the Bow can have water close to the surface. And the lots that fall away — along the escarpment and on the hillsides west of downtown — are where a full-height walk-out door becomes a real option instead of a deep well with steps.

What Calgary homeowners are after

What a Calgary homeowner wants from a basement window or door tends to follow the same rings. Close to downtown the driver is usually a legal suite that must get through a City of Calgary inspection, or a house going on the market where a buyer’s inspector has already written up the bedroom window. In the suburbs it is more often a family finishing space the builder framed as bedrooms without a window anyone could climb out of. The northeast asks for suite entry doors and egress windows together, because so many homes there are shared across generations. On sloped and edge-of-city lots, the conversation often ends at a walk-out door rather than a window.

All of that runs through one company: choosing and installing egress windows, enlarging undersized basement windows, separate-entrance and walk-out basement doors, window wells and covers, and the permits and stamped engineering that let the opening be made. We do not guess which of those suits you from a postal code. The wall and the lot tell us, and we look at both before we recommend a unit.