"Jeef" wrote

My brother lives in Waukesha County, Wisc and told me he can't remodel
his basement without putting in an auxiliary exit. I find this hard to
believe. Can anyone confirm this?

When did this ridiculous rule get passed? All new houses have to have 2
stairways from the basement?

Actually if you check, it probably says '2 exits' as in your first query.
One can probably be a window if it's of a certain size and and can be
reached by something built in to use as an exit in an emegency.

Emergency exit would be the reason and quite common to require such. An
older house may not have it but to officially 'upgrade' you have to add
them. That said, it depends on what he means by 'remodel his basement' as
to how far he needs to go.

When redoing a basement once in Virginia, we didnt have to knock any holes
as the back side had several windows within codespc for exits. We did have
to replace one of them so it could be flipped out but that was due to the
huge size of the basement (1,800sqft). Center had staircase to main house,
far back corner had exterior ground level door, and we added the escapable
window along the far back furthest from the door. Built a little 'window
seat' under it (opened for storage) that made that wndow reachable for
egress for a 4.5ft tall person (VA Code then). Using the existing posts, we
separated that far side with the window from stairwell to wall into 3 rooms
and an ajacent bathroom. False walls i guess you would call them as we
didnt mess with the existing posts, just framed around them and left
doorways (2 per room). The 3rd room was a sortof 1 room apartment with
egress on one side to the huge pool table room (had 2 doors to the huge
family room where the window was) and egress on the other side to the rest
of the unfinished basement where the exterior door was. The under stairwell
was made into a walk in closet, and a wall conjoined the bathroom
(mini-kitchen on that wall and sink, bathroom on other side with shower and
a toilet with a sink in the top tank such as you see in Japan).

They made us change one thing for code. We had to add more lights in the
unfinished part as it was now an egress point. We didnt have a wall switch
on the 'bedroom side' so added some lights then put in one of those battery
charger types that go on in a power outage but keep charging when power is
on. Neat huh! Now, we had to go that far because we were truely
'renovating' and clearly making a true 'living space'.