Wichita Egress Windows About Wichita Egress Windows
Wichita Egress Windows is a locally operated service that does one thing: code-compliant basement egress work across Wichita and Sedgwick County. Concrete cutting, egress window installs built to the 2018 International Residential Code as the Wichita/Sedgwick County Unified Building and Trade Code amends it, window wells, covers, and drainage, performed by insured local crews licensed with MABCD who cut foundations every week. No siding, no roofing, no “we also do decks.” Egress.
Why a specialist matters for this job
An egress window install is structural work on your foundation. Somebody is going to saw a hole roughly three feet wide through the wall that holds your house up, then build a drainage system in Group D clay that has to survive a Wichita May. The failure modes are not cosmetic: an undersized lintel, a well with no gravel bed, a backfill job that slopes toward the house. Cheap installs fail in exactly these three places, usually a couple of springs later.
That is why we do not treat this as a window sale with some digging attached. Every job runs the same sequence: permit, utility locates, layout against the joists and footing, wet-saw cut, framed and flashed opening, anchored well, 12 inches of washed gravel or a tie-in to the footing drain as the local code requires, graded backfill, final inspection. The full process is laid out on the egress window installation page, and the numbers behind every quote are on the pricing page.
How we operate
Free on-site measure, flat quote. Egress pricing depends on foundation type, dig depth, and access. Nobody can price it honestly from a phone call. We come out, measure, check the wall and the lot, and give you a flat number. The permit fee is itemized at cost, not buried.
The permit is our problem, not yours. Foundation openings in Wichita and unincorporated Sedgwick County require a building permit and a final inspection through the Metropolitan Area Building and Construction Department. Your installer files it, schedules the inspection, and meets the inspector. In Derby, Haysville, Park City, and Valley Center the permit goes through that city’s own office; in Andover it is the city’s adoption of the same Wichita/Sedgwick County code; in Maize and Goddard it routes through MABCD. We handle whichever jurisdiction your house sits in.
Straight talk about code. Wichita’s egress amendment is not the model code. It asks for 4.5 square feet of net clear opening with a 5.7-square-foot break-out area, ladder rungs 12 inches on center, a rated cover or guardrail on any well over 30 inches deep, and 12 inches of gravel under the well. We build to that and to the model 5.7 so the opening passes either reading, and the whole comparison is on the code page. What we will never do is guarantee a permit approval or promise a room “will pass.” The inspection belongs to MABCD or the city. Anyone who guarantees an inspection outcome is telling you something about how they operate.
Honest seasonality. With a 24-inch frost line, Wichita digs most of the year. The slow windows are the hard-freeze weeks of midwinter and the May-June saturation. When the ground is frozen or flooded we quote, permit, and do interior work like basement window replacement; we do not pretend a January dig in frozen clay is a good idea just to book your deposit.
Who hires us
Homeowners finishing basements, a large share of them adding a legal bedroom alongside a radon test, since Sedgwick County is EPA Zone 2 and nearly a third of tested homes in the county came in at or above the action level in the Kansas Radon Program’s 2010 data. Sellers and agents racing an inspection report, which is what code and permit help exists for. And owners of older homes in College Hill, Riverside, and Delano whose century-old basements have windows that were never designed for a human being to climb out of.
Where we work
Wichita is the hub, and crews run to Derby, Andover, Haysville, Maize, Goddard, Park City, and Valley Center. If you are just outside those, ask; the answer is usually yes.
Have a project in mind? Check the FAQ for the questions everyone asks, or send the form and we will set up a free on-site measure.