This is cool. Apparently I have managed to live 41 years in complete ignorance of these commonplace things (window wells). I feel like George Bush when he saw the supermarket scanner 
Never mind the plexiglas covers for the window wells. Anyone who has any weight at all (a 7-year-old child, f’rinstance) would crash through it pretty easily. If you’re really concerned about the danger of people falling into your 4 - 5 foot window wells, you should consider some sort of metal grating. Older houses in areas like Yonkers and Riverdale, in the Bronx, have them. I’m sorta surprised there isn’t some sort of building code requiring them for wells of a certain depth.
They can be treacherous. I’ve inadvertently stepped in one or two that were covered by ivy, pachysandra (sp?), etc. while I was measuring a house. I’ve not been seriously hurt, but a person could easily sprain an ankle or break a leg, and you’d be liable.
Just some friendly advice from —
The Dave-Guy
“since my daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” J.H. Marx
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I should cover 'em. I’ve lived in this house for 2 years, and I knew 2 years ago I should cover them. As I have no children, and have no friends with children, I’ve been lax. Besides, those metal things cost money!
I thought the plexiglass bubbles were sturdy. We used to jump on them at my best friend’s house and we never so much as cracked one. Of course, we weren’t bright enough to foresee the possiblility that they might break and even if we had, the wells were only a couple feet deep.
I’m sure the metal grates would be more secure, but they’ll block some of the light from your windows and unless the mesh is pretty fine it won’t stop critters from getting down there. Naturally, security for neighborhood kids (and security from lawsuits) is probably more important than the fate of toads.
The window wells in the house I grew up in, were more for water control than anything else. The wells were about a foot deep, and the windows were just at ground level, so the wells were more to keep water from leaking through the windows in a storm, than to allow light in.
>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<
—The dragon observes
I have a JPG of two snakes trying to eat the same toad at one time. Since one snake was terribly smaller than the other one, I feared that the big snake would swallow the toad, little snake and all. I interfered by bothering the smaller snake, and convincing him to let go.
FixedBack
I’ll come and have the toads for a snack.No snakes, please.
sun¤bear
Athena
What a wonderful conundrum…perhaps you could build a little ladder of rocks for them to climb on.
I have a similar experience. We bought our home 11 years ago and one of the first things we discovered was that we had small frogs using our bathroom plumbing as a transit system. They were coming through the overflow drain in the tub. Not in numbers, just 1 (once in a while 2) coming in and sitting in the tub, or on the shower wall, until one of us took a shower. At first, it was a bit disarming, but being the mother of 2 boys, who found it “cool”, I also adjusted quickly. We, naively, thought it to be the same frog returning daily on his travels. We named “him” Kermit and simply carried him to the garden when it was time to shower. The next year came Kermit Jr. and now, 11 years later, I can safely say we have carried hundreds (maybe thousands) of different frogs to our garden to dine on our bugs. With the exception of having to close our shower door tightly after a shower ( my husband is a Viet Nam vet and can’t sleep at night if he thinks any critter might be lurking) our lives have only been affected in the positive. If you ever needed a lesson in life perservering or in the fact that all things have a purpose in life…I mean!! All these different little family members, travelling the same route, year in and year out…they must be doing something; perhaps simply living and I say…Carry On!!
Lew
I once roomed in a townhouse with both a basement and a crawl space. The building was origninally a 2 bedroom 1 bath and an additional bedroom & bath was later added on to the ground floor, the crawl space was under this extension. I once rescued a young squirrel from our laundry room; it must have got in via the crawl space and gut stuck in there. Fortunately, my mom once raised a baby squirrel that had been orphaned by a hurricane so I knew exactly how to handle our visitor in the basement. I slipped on my heavy winter gloves, grabbed the squirrel after a brief chase, brought it upstairs and released it out the kitchen door.
I now rent a unit on the top floor of a garden apartment building. Twice in the five years I’ve been here, we’ve had a bird trapped in the stairwell. The first was small, probably a nuthatch, so I opened my door and let it in. I put on my gloves and trapped the bird in the bathroom, picked it up in one hand and put it out the kitchen window. A few days before, the screens in my unit had been removed for maintenance; the one in my kitchen still hasn’t been put back in! The second bird was a crow and I let animal control deal with that one!
“Age is mind over matter; if you don’t mind, it don’t matter.” -Leroy “Satchel” Paige