Home Remodeling Contractors in Tenino, WA

The City of Tenino runs its own Building Department. The building permit application is one of the forms on the city's website, and the city's fee schedule directs every application to the City Clerk's Office, which accepts it in person, by mail or by email. Building fees are figured from Thurston County's building fee tables rather than a separate city table.

Electrical work is the exception: the city's code leaves the electrical code to the state, so wiring is permitted and inspected by the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries. Plumbing, mechanical and building inspections stay with the city.

A Tenino permit expires if work has not started within 180 days of issue, or if work stops for 180 days. The building official can grant one extension of up to 180 days on a written request, so we set your start date once the permit is in hand.

Scatter Creek runs low in summer and floods in winter, and the land beside it is mapped as floodplain. The city's draft plan places most of Tenino's wetlands along the creek and south of the Yelm to Tenino Trail in City Park, and records coho salmon and cutthroat trout in the creek.

Inside a mapped flood area the building code goes beyond floor height. An enclosed space below the lowest floor has to let floodwater in and out through at least two openings, sized at one square inch for every square foot of enclosed area, with their bottoms no more than a foot above grade. The critical areas code also bars septic systems and drain fields anywhere in the 100-year floodplain.

Most of Tenino sits on a flat valley floor of porous prairie soil, and the city's draft plan maps an extreme critical aquifer recharge area under most of it. The city draws all of its drinking water from a shallow, unconfined aquifer, so the critical areas code only allows activity there when it will not let contaminants reach the groundwater.

The hills to the north, south and west are steeper, forested and broken by sandstone outcrops. Where a slope qualifies as a landslide or erosion hazard, the code prohibits septic drain fields and forbids discharging roof drains onto or above the slope, and vegetation stays in place unless the city approves an alteration.

Tenino's zoning code allows one accessory dwelling unit per lot of record, with up to 1,000 square feet of habitable floor area, attached to the house or detached from it. Whichever form it takes, the unit has to closely match the main house in design, color scheme and roof materials, and in the single-family, duplex, multifamily and West Tenino zones it needs an administrative use permit. ADUs are not counted in residential density.

A garage or other accessory building larger than 120 square feet and up to 1,000 square feet, and no taller than 14 feet, may go in a rear or side yard in the residential zones if it stays 5 feet from the property line and 6 feet from a neighbor's house. The city's tree preservation standards exempt building permits for single-family houses.

The Census Bureau's 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey puts the median Tenino home at 1980. About half of the homes were built before 1980 and roughly one in six before 1940, while about three in four are detached single-family houses. Margins are wide for a city this size, yet the older stock is plain to see.

The city's design standards, written to protect a downtown that has changed little since its 1906 fire, ask new commercial buildings for a sandstone element, but they do not apply to single-family houses or duplexes. For an older house the practical questions sit inside the walls: wiring, plumbing and insulation from earlier decades, which we allow for in the itemized price.