Home Remodeling Contractors in Curtis, WA

All applications, fees and approval notices for a Curtis project go through Lewis County's SmartGov portal. The Master Site Review comes first, and its site plan has to be drawn to scale with a scale bar and north arrow; the county will not accept one sketched over an aerial photo. It labels every building by use, gives the number of bedrooms in each, and locates wells and their sanitary control areas, septic tanks, drainfields and reserve areas, water and utility lines, stormwater facilities and any ground that will stay disturbed.

With that review approved, one complete set of building plans goes in. The county reads it against the building codes it has adopted, a set that took in the 2021 International Codes on May 6, 2025. A house on a private well also needs a well report, either the well log or a flow test showing gallons per minute. Walls with an eave height of 14 feet or more need a licensed structural engineer's stamp, the whole county is in seismic category D-1, and electrical permits come from the state Department of Labor and Industries.

Lewis County quotes two to four weeks to issue most single-family permits, with longer waits in the May to October building season, and a permit stays alive for 180 days after it is issued and 180 days after each inspection.

Rural Curtis lots run on their own water and wastewater, and the county's final inspection reflects that. Before a new house can be finaled, the septic system must have its own final approval, the road approach must be built and approved, and the owner submits a bacteria test from the last year and a nitrate test of the drinking water.

Setbacks are measured from a county road at 25 feet from the right of way, and never less than 55 feet from its centerline, with 5 feet to a side line and 15 feet to the rear, under a 35 foot height limit. A one story detached shed or shop of up to 200 square feet with no living space, and a retaining wall no taller than 4 feet, are exempt from a building permit. The county's feasibility handout adds that a lot near a landslide or erosion hazard, a steep slope or a channel migration zone may need a geotechnical report, and that a new septic permit usually means a soil evaluation with test holes.

Lewis County's 2013 shoreline inventory places Curtis in its Upper Chehalis, Willapa Hills management area: 265 square miles of rolling hills cut by medium gradient, winding streams. Around Curtis it maps two reaches of the South Fork Chehalis and one of Lake Creek. The inventory records bank erosion from channel migration along parts of the South Fork, bald eagle management zones along the river below Lost Creek, and it rates about 72 percent of the management area as moderately to highly prone to liquefaction and about 9 percent as landslide hazard.

Inside shoreline jurisdiction, the program treats a garage, deck, driveway, fence, utilities, a septic tank and drain field, and up to 250 cubic yards of grading as normal appurtenances of a house, as long as nothing is filled into a wetland or below the high water mark. The house has to come first on the lot, accessory buildings follow the same rules as the house, and a septic system or drainfield may go into a buffer only when no other location works.

Lewis County's emergency management account of the December 3, 2007 flood describes 14 to 20 inches of rain falling in the Willapa Hills and record flash flooding through Pe Ell, Boistfort, Doty and Adna before the water reached Chehalis and Centralia, including in places that had never flooded and were not considered floodway.

Inside a mapped floodway the county's chapter bars new houses, substantial improvements, landfill and new drinking water wells, and allows repairs and improvements that add no ground floor area. Elsewhere in a special flood hazard area, up to 500 cubic yards of permitted fill may go on an existing parcel outside the floodway, heating, ventilation, plumbing, air conditioning and electrical equipment sits two feet above the base flood, a septic system is placed where floodwater cannot damage it or be fouled by it, and any enclosed space under the lowest floor gets at least two flood openings, a square inch for each square foot, no higher than a foot above grade.

For the substantial improvement test, market value means the house alone, not the land, landscaping or detached buildings. The code accepts an independent appraisal, the building's actual cash value or a tax assessment adjusted to the market, so the scope and the valuation are worked out together before design is fixed.

Curtis lies outside any urban growth area, so the county's rural ADU chapter governs. It allows one accessory dwelling beside a single-family house, with no more than two bedrooms and 1,296 square feet measured from the outside walls, one family living in it, and the same primary road access as the house; a looped driveway needs two approved road approaches. The building permit also records that the ADU is no reason to divide the lot later.

Zoning decides whether one fits at all. The county's ADU handout allows them in Rural Residential Centers, the zoning Curtis Hill carries, and on Crossroads Commercial land, the designation at the Curtis crossroads, only beside an existing, legally established house.

Water is the next question. The county plan lists Boistfort Valley Water, a private system drawing on Little Mill Creek, the Chehalis River and a groundwater well, as a provider for Curtis Hill, and the county says an ADU on a public water system will likely need a separate connection. On a shared well the ADU needs a 100 foot sanitary control area kept clear of septic parts, or an engineer's reduction request, and a covenant on the neighbor's land if the circle crosses the line. The house septic must be sized for the bedrooms in both homes, or expanded, and the ADU gets its own tank.

The critical areas chapter Lewis County adopted in 2025 gives special consideration to protecting anadromous fish runs. Its maps are treated as a starting point: the code says some mapped features may be gone and unmapped ones may exist, so a site investigation and the county's review of the resulting report decide the real boundaries, and an approved report generally holds for five years. The county's online map lets anyone switch on the zoning and critical areas layers, which show streams, wetlands, floodway and steep slopes for a parcel.

There is no Census place for Curtis, so the nearest figures come from Census Tract 9715.02, which contains it and covers a much wider stretch of west Lewis County. The 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey counts about 2,045 homes in the tract with a median year built of 1982, two years newer than the county as a whole. The single largest age group is the oldest: about 383 homes, close to one in five, date from 1939 or earlier, with the 2000s, 1990s and 1970s close behind.

Around 87 percent of the homes are detached houses and about 11 percent are mobile homes, and close to nine in ten occupied homes are lived in by their owners. Prewar farmhouses and houses from the last fifty years call for different plans, so each gets its own scope and its own itemized price.