Home Remodeling Contractors in Olalla, WA

Olalla has no city hall. Its building permits come from the Kitsap County Department of Community Development, which takes applications for every permit type online and nowhere else. A new application starts in the county's Permit Application Portal; once it is accepted as complete, the file moves to the Online Permit Center, where fees are paid, reviews are followed and approved plans are downloaded.

The Health District reviews projects on septic but does not issue building permits itself. Its reviews start from a scaled site plan showing property lines, cut banks, streams and wetlands, the house and outbuildings, the well and its setbacks, the drainfield parts, stormwater areas and the driveway, along with everything the project adds.

Olalla sits outside every urban growth area in Kitsap County. Hearing examiner decisions for homes in the community record Rural Residential zoning, which allows one dwelling per five acres, and a county staff report for a site on Olalla Valley Road records Rural Protection, where the county's comprehensive plan allows one dwelling per ten acres.

Those densities limit how many homes a parcel can hold, not how a house can be remodeled. They matter most for a second dwelling, which the county treats under its rural ADU rules below, and for an addition, which still has to meet the zone's setbacks.

Saltwater is not the only shoreline near Olalla. The county's shoreline inventory lists Mace Lake, at about 31 acres, among the lakes large enough to fall under the Shoreline Master Program, and the list of shoreline lakes drafted for the 2021 program update names it again.

A shoreline buffer can shrink only in set ways. In Shoreline Residential a mitigation plan can bring the 85 foot buffer down to 50 feet; in Rural Conservancy the reduction stops at 100 feet and is open to a house only when slopes, wetlands, the lot's size or shape, or earlier clearing justify it. The program also treats eelgrass and kelp beds, forage fish spawning beaches, shellfish beds and mudflats as critical saltwater habitat, where bulkheads, fill, floats and nonresidential docks are allowed only in narrow cases.

Kitsap County's code counts every deep seated landslide as a high landslide hazard, along with slopes of 30 percent or more that a geologist finds unstable. Slopes of 15 percent or more count as a moderate hazard when the soil is highly erodible or groundwater seeps from them, and every slope of 40 percent or more counts as moderate regardless of soil.

The county's landslide map shows only potential hazard areas, and the owner is responsible for showing whether a hazard is really there. Signs the code lists include hummocky ground, tension cracks near the top of a bluff, leaning or bowed trees, springs on a slope face and fans of debris at the base of a steep ravine.

Outside an urban growth area Kitsap County allows one ADU per lot, and the owner has to live in the house or the unit. An attached unit, which the county defines as one joined to the house by at least four feet of habitable space, needs only construction permits and can take up to half the home's habitable area. A detached unit also needs a conditional use permit, is capped at 900 square feet or half the home's habitable area, whichever is smaller, and must stand within 150 feet of the house unless it converts an existing building such as a garage.

Both kinds must meet Health District water and sewage standards and add off street parking. The county also publishes pre-approved ADU plan sets. A guest house is the other option: under 900 square feet, no more than two habitable rooms, a kitchen or a bathroom but not both, never rented separately, and not allowed on a lot that has a detached ADU.

Census Bureau estimates for 2020 to 2024 count about 1,900 homes in the Olalla ZIP code area, and the median one was built in 1989. The stock is spread across the decades: roughly a quarter dates from the 1960s and 1970s, about a third from 2000 through 2019, and about one in fifteen from 1939 or earlier. Nearly nine in ten occupied homes are lived in by their owners.

About four in five homes are detached houses, and close to one in five is a mobile or manufactured home. Changes to a manufactured home go through the state Department of Labor and Industries, which requires its permit before the work starts for jobs such as adding a room, replacing siding or cutting a new opening; the county can require its own permit as well, and it inspects a room addition built beside the home.