Every service below has its own Martha Lake page — the '80s–'90s subdivision stock here, what's true about county permits, and why whole streets age together.
This is the work Martha Lake homes ask of us — from the lake ring to the 164th corridor. Flip through and picture your home next.
Get a Free Estimate →Martha Lake has two housing stories. The plateau between Lynnwood and Mill Creek filled in fast through the '80s and '90s — cul-de-sacs along 164th and up Ash Way wearing the era's T1-11, hardboard, and early engineered boards with first-generation vinyl windows, all reaching end-of-life on the same clock. Around the water it's older and messier: cabins from the lake's resort decades, winterized and added onto so many times that one wall can carry four eras of framing and flashing.
Martha Lake never incorporated, so jurisdiction sits with Snohomish County PDS — a surprise to owners expecting Lynnwood or Mill Creek to be involved. The second surprise is friendlier: county code exempts like-for-like siding replacement and same-size window swaps from building permits. We confirm what your parcel and scope actually require, and handle any permit that applies, start to finish.
…and the unincorporated blocks between Lynnwood and Mill Creek.
No pressure, no jargon — a clear path from first call to final inspection.
Call (360) 296-9380 or send the form — tell us a little about your home and what's failing.
We measure at your home, open up anything suspicious with your OK, and write a bid specific to your house — minimal boilerplate.
Permits pulled, work scheduled around the weather, and the final inspection passed before we call it finished.
Every bid is measured on site and itemized — these are the factors that actually change the number.
Wall area drives material; height drives scaffold time. A lake-ring two-story prices differently than a 164th-corridor rambler.
Siding replacement →What's behind the old siding is the honest unknown — we scope known rot into the bid and price discovered rot transparently, per repair.
Rot repair →Hardie ColorPlus, primed fiber cement, or engineered wood — we quote options side by side so you see the real difference.
Compare materials →Combining siding and windows saves one full mobilization and gets properly integrated flashing — the cheapest time to do windows is during a re-side.
Window replacement →Martha Lake started as stump-ranch country. Homesteaders arrived in the 1870s — the lake most likely takes its name from Martha Loughridge, who settled here with her husband William in 1872 — and for two generations the logged-over land was worked as small farms. In the early 1920s, promoters subdivided the cutover around Alderwood Manor into small 'ranchette' farms, and the district's population jumped from a couple dozen to well over a thousand in five years. Almost none of those first houses survive; what they left behind is the road grid.
The lake itself became the draw after Highway 99 opened in 1927. A resort on the shore rented rowboats and swim floats to Seattle day-trippers for decades — the property later became the county's Martha Lake Park — and summer cabins filled in around the water: small wood-frame places, many later winterized and added onto. That's why the lake ring still carries the community's oldest and least predictable housing, with cottage bones under layers of remodels. A small private airstrip ran off Ash Way from the late 1950s; the county bought it in 1998 and turned the runway into Martha Lake Airport Park.
The Martha Lake most people live in arrived in the '80s and '90s, when Seattle-bound growth filled the plateau between Lynnwood and the new city of Mill Creek. First counted as a census-designated place in 1980 with about 7,000 residents, it tripled to nearly 22,000 by 2020 — nearly all of it cul-de-sac subdivisions wearing the era's T1-11, hardboard, and early engineered-wood siding with first-generation vinyl windows.
That split personality drives the work today: subdivision streets age out in unison and bid predictably, while lake-ring homes need era-by-era detective work. Both permit through Snohomish County rather than any city hall — the lasting consequence of never incorporating.
A free on-site estimate anywhere in Martha Lake — measured at your home, itemized, and specific to your house.
