Home Remodeling Contractors in Ashford, WA

Ashford is an unincorporated community, not a city or a town, so building permits come from Pierce County Planning and Public Works. The county's Online Development Guide lets you look up a parcel's constraints, zoning and permit needs, but it does not take applications; those are filed through the PALS+ online portal.

Once a complete package is in, a permit technician emails an invoice, and an application whose fees are not paid within five days is cancelled. Reviewers post any corrections as requests in the portal, and the approved, stamped documents arrive by email and must be kept on site for every inspection. Septic and well approvals come from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department and electrical permits from the state Department of Labor and Industries or Tacoma Public Utilities, and the final inspection waits until each related permit is closed.

Some work needs no building permit at all: painting, tiling, cabinets and countertops, siding replacement, most reroofing, and decks no more than 30 inches above grade. The county notes that these exemptions do not apply to manufactured homes.

The Upper Nisqually Valley Community Plan, adopted by the Pierce County Council on September 28, 1999, covers Alder, Elbe and Ashford up to the Nisqually entrance of Mount Rainier National Park, and roughly half of its area is public land. It names Ashford one of three Gateway Communities and splits it into zones: Village Center, where homes are allowed at three units per acre beside shops and lodging; Village Residential, which takes in the Echo Valley and High Echo subdivisions at a base of one home per ten acres; and Tourist Commercial.

The plan describes Echo Valley as 305 small lots on the southeast side of Ashford, more than half of them vacant at the time, and High Echo as 55 lots along Mount Tacoma Canyon Road. The valley's design standards in Pierce County Code 18J.20 list civic, multifamily, commercial and industrial projects, land divisions and site development permits, so an interior remodel of a house is not on that list.

Walter and Cora Ashford platted the townsite in 1904, the same year the Tacoma Eastern Railroad reached it, and the plan lists ten sites of local historic importance around Ashford, among them a general store built in 1905.

The river rises twice a year: on snowmelt in April, May and June, and on heavy rain from November through February. Glacial outburst floods, sudden releases of water from the head of the valley carrying boulders and trees, are recorded on the Nisqually in 1926, 1932, 1934, 1947, 1955 and 1986, and the community plan notes that the river has shifted its course over the last century.

After a flood in January 1959 a dike was built in 1961 from the park boundary to just past the Nisqually Park subdivision upriver of Ashford, and in December 1977 a flood that breached it destroyed eight homes and twelve lots there. Parts of the valley floor lie in the 100 year floodplain. The county's hazard assessment also records a lahar that ran out at least as far as Ashford within the last 3,400 years, and county code puts the average interval between Case II lahars from Mount Rainier at the low end of 100 to 500 years.

Homes in the valley draw water from individual wells or from community systems, the largest of which is the Ashford Water District. A new house or ADU needs proof of an approved source, either a certificate from the water purveyor or a health department approval for a well, and septic applications are reviewed by the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department; the county warns that a new septic system or well can add significant time to a schedule.

Fire protection is checked too. A home under 3,600 square feet needs a water provider certificate showing 750 gallons per minute for 45 minutes and a hydrant within 350 feet of the frontage, or a fire protection worksheet where that is not available. Interior remodels, and additions that add no more than 1,500 square feet to the original fire area, do not need a new certificate.

Because Ashford lies outside the Urban Growth Area, a lot with a house may have one ADU, attached or detached, of up to 1,250 square feet of interior habitable space, basements and attics included but garages not. A new detached unit stays out of the required setbacks and no taller than the main house, unless it sits over a detached garage, where it may rise one story higher, and it needs its own off-street parking because no major transit stop is nearby.

Ashford is small enough that census figures are rough. The Census Bureau's 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey counts about 167 homes, all detached single-family houses lived in by their owners, with a median build year of 1976, but its margins of error are almost as large as the counts. The county's own 1996 inventory for the whole valley found 613 homes, every one single-family, about four in five built on site and the rest single-wide or double-wide mobile homes.

The county's residential application lists a manufactured home as its own project type, separate from a remodel or addition of a site-built house, so the first step is knowing which kind of home is on the lot. For either, we write the scope and a line by line price before anything is ordered.