Burien Crawl Space Repair

Burien’s 1940s and 1950s housing comes to 6,437 units, 30.3% of the city, a share for those two decades matched among the nineteen only by Shoreline. Add the 1960s and the years from 1940 to 1969 account for 48.8%. Another 1,712 units are prewar. Building since has been light: 2,694 units in all since 2000. The counts include apartments, so they cannot say how many of these are houses over a crawl space, only that an old crawl space is the common case.

A crawl space under a house from the 1940s or 1950s has had seventy years or more of visits: plumbing re-run, wiring replaced, a furnace swapped, insulation added and pulled down again. Each visit can leave a torn ground cover or none. So the first job is an inventory of what is there now. Is the soil covered at all? Are the sills, joist ends and any posts dry and sound where they sit closest to the ground, and do the posts stand on footings or on the soil? Is there old pipe or duct wrap that should be identified before anyone disturbs it? Asbestos in a crawl space covers that last question and wood rot in a crawl space the framing.

Burien is mapped partly in the federal soil survey’s King County area and partly in its City of Seattle area, and most of it carries no drainage class. Urban land-Alderwood complex covers three of the largest map units, 74.9% of the mapped area across three slope classes, and plain Urban land another 6.1%. Burien, Seattle and Shoreline are the three places this site covers where more than four-fifths of the ground is unrated, so their soil shares are not compared with the other sixteen, and Burien’s 0.0% wet-rated share should not be read as well-drained ground.

The part that is rated is all moderately well drained, and much of it is on slopes. The largest rated unit, Alderwood-Kitsap complex on 12 to 60 percent slopes, covers 8.4% of the mapped area, and Alderwood-Everett-Urban land complex on 35 to 60 percent slopes another 3.0%. A small unit of beaches and tidal soils (0.5%) is mapped as well.

With so little from the map, a Burien crawl space is read from the house. Look under it in a winter rain: water on top of the ground cover, damp soil along one wall, or a musty smell all point to where water comes from. On a sloping lot, the uphill wall is the first place to look. A musty smell from the crawl space explains what that smell usually means.

The Seattle-Tacoma airport station is 2.6 miles from the Census Bureau’s internal point for Burien, the third-shortest such distance among the nineteen places, and its 29 years of record behind the annual normal are the most of any published station. Its 1991–2020 annual normal is 39.34 inches, 75.4% of it from October through March, with 93.4 days a year of a tenth of an inch or more and 5.6 of an inch or more. The only other station within 15 miles is the Renton airport, 6.2 miles away, with 34.69 inches; the 4.65-inch gap between them is small.

Sea-Tac averages 25.2 nights a year at or below freezing, 7.2 of them in December and 7.0 in January, and about one night a year at 20°F or below. In an old crawl space with open vents and uninsulated supply lines, those few nights are when pipes freeze; frozen pipes in a crawl space covers what to insulate.

None of Burien’s four ZIP codes lies even two-thirds inside the city. 98166, the largest piece at 34.2% of Burien’s land, is 59.4% inside it; 98168, 30.1% of the city, only 34.5%; 98146 and 98148 just under half each. 98146 reaches into Seattle and 98148 into Des Moines. A Burien mailing address is therefore weak evidence of which city’s permit desk applies; check the city limits first, and outside them in unincorporated King County apply to the county’s Permitting Division, with electrical permits from L&I.

Inside the city, the Permit Center in Community Development issues building permits through MyBuildingPermit, and Burien runs its own electrical permitting; L&I lists it among the cities that do. Burien’s building-permit exemptions were not read for this page, so put the question of a ground cover, new posts or a sealed crawl space to the Permit Center before the work is scheduled.

The Department of Revenue lists one rate for Burien, 10.4% for October 1 to December 31, 2026, charged on the whole contract; the cost guide’s ranges are before it. For an owner-occupier facing structural repair on an older house, King County’s Housing Repair Program makes repair loans to income-qualified owners in King County outside Seattle and Bellevue, which includes Burien.