Basement Walkout Entrance, Bridgewater

Why a walkout changes the space

A finished basement with only an interior staircase is part of the house above it. The same basement with its own exterior entrance is a separate unit, and in the current Nova Scotia rental market, that difference is what makes a legal secondary suite possible.

This property already had the ceiling height and rough-in plumbing. What it did not have was egress, and without it the space could not be a suite.

The structural work

Cutting an opening in a foundation wall removes a section of the structure carrying the house, so the sequence matters.

An engineer specified the opening size and the lintel: the beam spanning it that picks up the load the removed concrete had been carrying. Temporary shoring took the load before any cutting. The opening was saw-cut, the lintel was set with proper bearing at both ends, and only then did the shoring come out.

The work was permitted and inspected at the defined stages.

The drainage work, which is where walkouts fail

A stairwell is a lined pit dug against the foundation, open to the sky, with a door at the bottom of it. Every drop of rain that lands in it collects there, along with anything running off the surrounding grade, and this is the South Shore, where post-tropical systems deliver very high rainfall totals.

Three things prevent that ending in a flooded basement, and all three went in here:

A grated drain at the base of the stairs, tied into the footing drain with a real outlet, not a pipe that runs a metre and stops in gravel, which is what we find every time we are called to a walkout that floods.

Membrane on the stairwell retaining walls. They are foundation walls now, holding back saturated soil on three sides.

Grade sloped away from the top of the opening, so surface water from the yard is not funnelled into the stairwell.

A sill pan and proper flashing at the door completed it.

Result

A dry, code-compliant separate entrance, inspected and signed off, and a basement that can now be used as a legal suite.