Fitting a window well is a half-day job for one person and a two-hour job for two. The steel goes on last. What decides whether it still looks right in ten years is the excavation and the base.
This assumes a residential foundation, a well of 42″ or less, and no structural work on the window opening. If you are enlarging the opening to meet egress, that is foundation cutting and needs a permit and somebody who does it for a living. Before you start, make sure you have the three measurements right.
1. Dig wider than the well
Excavate a few inches wider and deeper than the well on all sides. You need room to set the well plumb, room to get gravel in behind it, and room for your hands.
Digging exactly to size guarantees a fight, and the fight is usually lost by forcing the well in slightly out of square, which is where the leaks start.
2. Build the base out of clear crushed stone
Six to eight inches of clear crushed stone at the bottom, levelled. Clear stone means washed, with the fines screened out — not road crush, not pit run. Fines pack, and packed fines hold water exactly where you were trying to move it away from.
If you can reach the weeping tile, tie the base into it. That is the difference between a well that drains and a well that is a bucket. If you cannot reach it, a deeper stone bed buys you a reservoir that gives the water somewhere to sit while it soaks away.
3. Set the well and check it twice
Drop the well in, push the flanges flat against the foundation, and check plumb on both sides before you fasten anything. The top lip should sit at or just above finished grade.
Getting it a little high is fine. Getting it low is not — a lip below grade turns the well into the low point of the yard, and everything that lands on the ground eventually finds it.
4. Fasten to the foundation
Concrete screws or sleeve anchors through the flange, spaced evenly down both sides. Do not over-tighten — on 20-gauge steel you can dimple the flange and pull it away from the wall between fasteners, which opens the gap you are trying to close.
A bead of exterior sealant behind the flange before you fasten is cheap and worth doing, particularly on a poured wall that is not perfectly flat.
5. Backfill with stone, not with what you dug out
This is the step most often skipped and the one that causes the most damage. Backfill the gap behind the well with the same clear crushed stone, not with the clay you excavated.
Clay against the steel does two things, both bad: it holds water against the galvanizing, and it swells when wet and shrinks when dry. On prairie clay — Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, most of Alberta — that seasonal movement is what pushes a well out of square over a few winters. Stone does not move and does not hold water.
6. Grade away from the house
Finish the ground sloping away from the foundation, not level and not toward it. On most lots this slope is the only thing keeping surface water and meltwater out of the well, and it is free.
7. Fit the cover last
Once the well is in and the grade is right, a cover keeps rain, snow and leaves out of the drainage you just built. If the well is an egress well, make sure whatever you put on it can be removed from inside without tools. Steel, aluminum or polycarbonate walks through which to pick.
Doing several at once
If you are fitting more than one opening, order them together. Freight is charged once per order rather than per item, so six wells cost the same to ship as one. Ordering them one at a time is the most expensive way to buy from us. Shop all 213 sizes.
Tools
Shovel, wheelbarrow, four-foot level, hammer drill with a masonry bit, driver, caulking gun, tape. Gloves — cut galvanized edges are sharp.