Window Well Covers & Drainage in Des Moines

Window well covers and drainage are the cheap insurance of basement work - and Des Moines Egress Windows treats them as one system, because in this metro’s clay soil a covered well with dead drainage still floods, and a drained well without a cover slowly silts itself back to failure. Covers run $150–$600 installed; drainage repairs and upgrades run $300–$1,000.

If your well fills every March, holds a puddle after storms, or has become the neighborhood’s leaf archive, this page is the fix. If the well itself is rusted through or shoved off the wall, you want window well installation instead - and if you’re not sure which you need, that’s what the free measure settles.

Covers: what to buy and the one code rule that matters

A good cover keeps out rain, snow, leaves, pets, and the occasional kid - while letting light through and, on an egress well, letting a person out.

The code rule worth underlining: on an egress window, IRC R310 requires the cover to be releasable or removable from inside without keys, tools, or special knowledge. The escape opening is only as good as the thing sitting on top of it. Screwed-down covers, deadweight steel grates, and “we’ll just bolt it for winter” all turn a legal bedroom back into a code violation - inspectors check, and so do buyers’ inspectors at resale. Every cover we install over an egress well releases from inside, and we show you how before we leave.

Covers earn their keep here in two seasons: fall, when the metro’s mature-tree neighborhoods - Beaverdale, Waveland, the older blocks of Urbandale and West Des Moines - drop enough leaves to bury a well in a weekend; and winter, when an uncovered well collects snow that melts straight down against your window during the first thaw.

Drainage: the part you can’t see and can’t skip

Central Iowa clay drains slowly and holds water against foundation walls - hydrostatic pressure looking for a way in. A window well is a hole punched into that system, and it survives only if water leaving the well has somewhere better to go than through your window. The working system, bottom to top:

1. A washed-gravel bed under the well floor, deep enough to store a storm’s worth of water while it percolates.
2. A path down - a vertical gravel column or drain connecting the bed to the footing drain tile that rings most poured foundations built since the 1980s. Water enters the well, drops through the gravel, and exits via the tile to the sump. That’s the gold standard.
3. A gravel dry well where no footing tile exists - the reality in much of pre-war Des Moines and some mid-century block-foundation stock. We dig deeper and wider and let storage-plus-percolation do the tile’s job.
4. Grade and compaction at the surface: backfill compacted in lifts and sloped away from the wall, so surface water sheds past the well instead of pouring in. In newer Ankeny and Johnston subdivisions, a decade of settling backfill has quietly reversed a lot of builder grading - we correct it as part of the job.

What kills drainage: silt from years of open-top exposure, roots, construction debris in the original bed, or a bed that was never more than a bag of decorative rock. The rebuild - excavate the floor, restore the gravel, reconnect the path down - is the $300–$1,000 line on the pricing page, and it’s the single highest-value repair in this trade.

The system check we run at every measure

Because cover, drainage, well, and window fail as a chain, the free measure looks at all four: cover fit and release, well anchoring and rust, gravel bed condition (a five-gallon bucket of water tells the truth fast), buck and sill rot at the window, and the surrounding grade. You get one flat quote sorted by what’s necessary versus what’s nice - sometimes that’s a $200 cover, sometimes it’s drainage, occasionally it’s “your well is fine, your downspout is the problem,” which costs you nothing to hear.

Wet wells matter more when the room behind them matters: a finished basement bedroom, a radon-mitigated family room, a basement window you just paid to replace. And if the well protects the escape opening for a bedroom or basement ADU, keeping it dry and code-legal protects the bedroom count your appraisal depends on - see code compliance upgrades if that’s the situation.

Send the form with a photo of the well, wet or dry. We cover Des Moines plus Ankeny, West Des Moines, Urbandale, and Johnston, and the work is handled by independent local contractors.