Cellar Door

I woke up yesterday determined to settle the cellar door problem once and for all. Having forgotten the issues, I had to reinvent the wheel, but now I think I've got it.

Use a standard Bilco door. Steel doors on a steel base. Done. It doesn't work because they are about 22" high and with these stairs, the top of the door opening is just 4' above the stairs.

Okay, then, remove the existing stairs and replace them with 7" x 11.5" good steps. More or less the same problem.

Well, I guess we have to build our own doors. A 24" x 80" fiberglass door weighs 95 pounds. Where do you buy hardware like Bilco uses? Nowhere I can find. So, we build the doors from plywood. We cover the plywood with mineral roll roofing. This is starting to sound like a hillbilly solution.

Well, Bilco has a line (BR series) of doors designed for sloping accessways. So, we build a sloping accessway. A flat roof extends 30" from the house about 36" from the top of the existing cellar stairs wall and that provides 6' 1" clearance on the stairs. Only 6' 1" because that's the height of the basement door--truth in advertising. The largest Bilco door, BR-3, fits and they do the "heavy lifting" with the door springs.

This seems good for the BR2 egress window. Currently, if you use the window, you fall 11' feet to your death. With this design, you have a platform.

Home Depot sells the Bilco BR-3 for $950 (including tax). They'll ship it to my local store for free and it looks as if it is as returnable as anything you buy at Home Depot--that is, it's not a custom cabinet.

I'm sure we could build the accessway walls in wood, but I'm not sure it would look professional. I could frame it in wood and get a pro to stucco it, but there's no other stucco on the house.

I kind of like the look of the rendering above: Pay a pro to form, pour, and finish concrete, including a header beam under the top of the Bilco door. For the roof, I'm thinking two slabs of cast concrete that we could just place by gravity, then go nuts with the clear silicone.

If we went with wood framing, we'd need wood siding just about touching the patio slab. You can do that with cement fiber siding, but it doesn't look right. Then the new siding dies into the concrete foundation wall? That doesn't look right. Whatever we do, we paint it all to match, but still.

Then I thought, what about hiding it behind furniture?

Maybe we do slanted wall as shown on the right (east) side, but build a low wall on the left (west). A place for drinks that hides the Bilco door altogether.