Crawl Space Repair in Edmonds

The U.S. Geological Survey’s report on that winter records many landslides along the bluffs at Edmonds, Mukilteo and Woodway. It describes the Woodway slide of January 15, 1997 closely: it fell from a bluff about 70 meters high that exposed advance outwash, transition beds and Lawton Clay, and seepage near the top of the clay was still visible on May 29, more than four months later. The same report puts December 1996 precipitation at Seattle at 287 millimeters, 191 percent of normal.

The arrangement in that description, outwash sand over clay with water seeping out near the top of the clay, closely matches the one Snohomish County’s code uses to define a landslide hazard area: a slope steeper than 33 percent, at least 10 feet high, that intersects a contact of permeable over impermeable sediment and has springs or seeps. That definition governs unincorporated county land, not Edmonds, and this site could not open the city’s own landslide hazard page, so it says nothing here about which Edmonds lots the city maps.

The rain record around Edmonds today is consistent. The nearest published station is the Everett airport, 7.3 miles from the city’s Census internal point, with a 1991–2020 normal of 33.37 inches, and Seattle’s Sand Point station is 9.8 miles away with 37.82 inches. Their 4.45-inch spread is the smallest of the nineteen places, shared with Shoreline. What the 1996–97 report shows is that an average winter is not the one that matters on a bluff.

Edmonds is mapped mostly as Alderwood-Urban land complex, 45.2% of the mapped area on 2 to 8 percent slopes and 15.4% on 8 to 15 percent slopes, all rated moderately well drained. Everett very gravelly sandy loam, rated somewhat excessively drained, covers another 10.7% across three slope classes. Only 1.3% is poorly drained and 0.6% very poorly drained.

The steep ground is in the same map. Among the city’s twelve largest map units, 18.5% of the mapped area lies in units mapped on slopes of 15 percent or more: Alderwood gravelly sandy loam on 15 to 30 percent slopes (8.5%), Alderwood-Everett gravelly sandy loams on 25 to 70 percent slopes (7.3%), and smaller areas of Everett very gravelly sandy loam and Urban land-Alderwood complex. The drainage class of those units says the soil sheds water; it says nothing about what lies under it or where water comes out on a slope face.

That is why, on a sloping Edmonds lot, a drainage proposal should start with the discharge point. A drain that collects water around a crawl space and releases it at the top of a slope adds water where seepage does the damage. Where water reaches the house from uphill, intercepting it with a curtain drain before it gets to the foundation is one option; on this site’s cost guide that runs $2,250 to $5,375 on top of an interior drainage scope of $4,025 to $7,175, metro-wide modeled ranges before sales tax. Ask the Permit Center what applies to the parcel before anything is trenched. What crawl space drainage covers lists the parts of a scope.

Edmonds’s biggest decade was the 1960s, with 4,845 housing units, and the 1970s added 3,350. Before that, the 1950s added 2,456 and the years before 1950 1,174; after, the 1980s added 2,675 and the 1990s 2,349. Building since 2000 comes to 2,630 units, and since 2020 to 147.

A city that built mostly in two decades and then slowed has many crawl spaces of a similar age, and in fifty or sixty years most will have had some later work done in them, whether on heating, plumbing, wiring or insulation. Each trip under the house is a chance for a ground cover to be pulled back and not relaid, for insulation to be knocked loose, or for a vent to be closed and forgotten. Before pricing anything, find out what the crawl space holds now, starting with whether the soil is covered and whether the framing over it is dry. What a crawl space inspection covers describes how a contractor should get from that to a written scope.

Inside Edmonds, building permits come from the city’s Permit Center, through MyBuildingPermit.com. Edmonds is not on L&I’s list of cities that run their own electrical permits, so a new circuit for a sump pump or a dehumidifier is permitted and inspected by L&I; no Edmonds page this site opened says so in words, and L&I suggests confirming jurisdiction for an address. Which crawl space work Edmonds exempts from a building permit has not been read here.

Edmonds is two ZIP code areas. 98026 covers 56.1% of the city’s land, but only 53.3% of 98026 lies inside Edmonds, so a 98026 address may be outside the city; 98020 covers 43.8% of Edmonds and lies 75.5% inside it. Outside the city limits, in unincorporated Snohomish County, building permits come from the county’s Planning and Development Services. The city publishes no neighborhood list that this site found; it designates Neighborhood Centers and Hubs, but the pages read do not name them.

The Department of Revenue lists Edmonds at 10.7% for October 1 to December 31, 2026, the highest rate of the nineteen places, shared with Lynnwood. It applies to the whole contract price for repair work on a home, labor and materials together, and the cost guide’s ranges leave it out.