Planning Exterior Home Services in Spokane

Outside a Spokane-area house, the work is usually several jobs wearing one name: a gutter clean, a house wash, a fence and a driveway repair arrive as four bookings on one calendar, sharing one gate, one parking lane and one short season.

Three questions decide whether they can all happen:

• Who owns the ground the work spills onto. A container, a lift or a pile of material standing in the street, the alley, the sidewalk or the strip between the curb and your property line is the street owner’s business as well as yours.
• What has to happen before ground is opened. Buried lines do not care what the job is called.
• When in the year it can be done. The region’s frost season is long enough to be part of the scope rather than an excuse at the end.

This page plans exterior work at that level, for the owner of a house they live in. It does not decide whether a project needs a building permit, does not cover cleaning methods, materials or what may be washed into a storm drain, and does not teach the work. Where the question belongs to an office rather than a street, the Spokane home project resource router carries that half.

The answer changes with jurisdiction. The City of Spokane, the City of Spokane Valley and unincorporated Spokane County each run their own right-of-way rules, and a Spokane mailing address does not tell you which applies. Settle that first with the jurisdiction guide.

Quick route

Sort the work into the questions it raises

Four kinds of exterior job raise a permit or notice question of their own, on top of whether the work itself is permitted: work that occupies the public way with equipment, material or a person; work that changes how a vehicle reaches the property; work that moves ground; and work that takes a structure apart or leaves the property as debris. A tree in the right of way is a fifth case, and it belongs to the jurisdiction that owns the ground rather than to the household that wants the light back.

The public way: three sets of rules

City of Spokane

The City’s rule begins with a sentence most owners have never read: a person proposing to dig up, excavate, work in, occupy by person, equipment, structure or material, or in any fashion obstruct a public way must first apply for a street obstruction permit. The same section lists the few activities that do not need one — a licensed tree firm with a street tree permit, a sign company doing routine maintenance, a surveyor — and then requires everyone, permit or not, to notify the department of their activities anyway.

The application carries the practical detail. It must be submitted at least three business days before the start date, and it separates work that cuts or digs the surface from work that does not. A storage unit or dumpster in the right of way uses a shorter form and needs a map showing its footprint: north arrow, street names, dimensions to the curb, intersection and centreline, and how much of the right of way the container will impede. Notice for that one is a minimum of 24 hours, and issuance may take up to three working days; an application sent after 2 p.m. may not be processed until the following day.

Two more City rules catch seasonal projects. From about November 15 to March 15, a container or vehicle in a residential area must be placed on the odd-numbered side of the street for snow removal. And work in an arterial, collector, state highway or the central business district needs a site-specific traffic control plan, where a local access road can use a generic one.

On fees, the applications in force on 4 October 2026 print $150 minimum for a permit that digs and $40 for the first three days of one that does not, plus daily charges, and $150 for a storage unit or dumpster for 15 days. The department states that its fees are amended annually and that the current fee schedule supersedes older figures, so read those numbers as the shape of the cost. Online obstruction permitting is offered to licensed professionals; a household job is an individual permit. The Permit Team answers at 509-625-6999 and PermitTeam@spokanecity.org.

City of Spokane Valley

Spokane Valley defines right of way widely: all property in which the City has any form of ownership or title, including easements, held for public roadway or utility purposes, whether or not a roadway exists. Unless the activity is exempt under SVMC 9.50.010, a right-of-way permit is required of anyone performing construction work or otherwise engaging in activity inside existing City right of way or on City-owned infrastructure, and a traffic control plan has to be submitted with the application. The City accepts WSDOT’s pre-approved plans, with one published limit: the TC-5 shoulder closure is allowed only where ten feet of unobstructed travel width can be kept in each direction. Apply through the permit portal or the paper form, and pay fees before the application is processed. The Permit Center is at 10210 E Sprague Ave, 509-720-5240.

Unincorporated Spokane County

The county routes road obstruction permits, approach permits and right-of-way utility permits through Public Works, and its applicant guidelines are stricter on timing than either city: requests must arrive at least five working days before work starts, and a permit number is not an approval. Traffic control plans are required for road closures, for obstructing one or more lanes and for shoulder work, and they can add up to two more days. A road obstruction bond of $10,000 is required, along with a certificate of insurance naming Spokane County as an additional insured at $1 million or more per occurrence. Work that starts without notification draws a $500 fine and can be charged up to $500 a day, and a street paved within the last three years cannot be cut except in an emergency. The county also asks that homeowners in the affected area be notified before work begins, and a closure held longer than 12 hours needs three days of advance public notice. The Permit Center is on 509-477-7151.

Access: how vehicles and material get in

If a project changes how a vehicle reaches the property, that is a separate approval from the work itself, and each jurisdiction requires it.

In the City of Spokane a driveway approach application is reviewed in up to five working days. Approach dimensions are limited to a maximum of 40 percent of the street frontage, up to 30 feet, and the approach must serve an off-street parking space. Construction has to be done by a contractor who meets the City’s right-of-way requirements, and a street obstruction permit must be obtained before work starts. One rule is easy to miss: excavating within ten feet of an existing street tree means contacting the Urban Forestry Program first. Removing an approach is not neutral either — the gap has to be replaced with City-standard curb and sidewalk.

In unincorporated Spokane County every approach that connects to a county road needs an approach permit, including a private driveway serving up to three lots or parcels. Rural approaches — the ones without a curb — are inspected for sight distance, grade and drainage, and the county’s own brochure sets the terms: no driveway closer than seven and a half feet from a property line; sight distance at the entry and exit of about ten times the posted speed limit; approach grades inside the right of way of no more than 8 percent in the urban area and 2 percent in rural areas, and never more than 10 percent within ten feet of the county road right of way; crushed rock in the right of way limited to 5/8 minus; and no approach work at all before the initial inspection and the inspection letter that follows it. Some rural approaches need a galvanised steel culvert with a foot of cover, sized by the county, and the fire district asks for a 20-foot-wide approach. The county also says plainly that a neighbour’s claim about where a property line runs is a civil matter and not something its inspector settles.

In Spokane Valley, a driveway approach permit covers a new driveway or revisions to an existing one, through the same Permit Center.

The pattern is the same in all three: the approach work and the obstruction permit are two separate applications, and one can hold up the other.

Before ground is opened: the locate

Washington’s dig law defines excavation as any operation in which earth, rock or other material on or below the ground is moved or otherwise displaced by any means, including installing a sign. Anyone excavating must notify every utility that could be affected, and the state’s one-call service does that in a single ticket. Homeowners can file through the homeowner route, which needs no account, and are asked to white-line the work area first.

Two limits matter. A locate covers the lines belonging to the participating operators; lines that are privately owned — a water line to a shed, an irrigation main, a buried feed to an outbuilding — are the property owner’s to know about, and the agency publishes a list of private locators for that. And a locate marks what is there; it does not mark what is safe.

Season, snow and the calendar

The climate record is why exterior work here is planned around a window. The National Weather Service’s 1991–2020 normals for Spokane International Airport list 45.4 inches of seasonal snowfall and 132 days a year with a minimum temperature at or below freezing; the earliest freeze on record fell on 11 September and the latest on 25 May.

The City’s own snow season runs from November 15 to March 15. In that window a full-city plow is called when four inches or more falls, residential plows follow arterial and hill routes, parking rules change — residents are asked to park on the odd side of the street in residential areas, and recreational vehicles, boats and trailers have to be off the street — and the owner’s duties sharpen. Owners and occupants must keep the sidewalk next to their property clear of snow and ice, and snow from private ground may not be plowed or placed into the street or any other part of the public right of way. Snow off a sidewalk or driveway approach may go into the planting strip or onto a municipal berm if it does not block the view of a sign or create a hazard.

Two further calendar questions sit outside the snow season but inside the project. Outdoor burning is restricted by conditions rather than by date, so the clean air agency’s current burn status is the check before any yard debris is burned. And renovation or demolition of a structure is an asbestos question before it is a hauling question: most projects need a survey by an AHERA-certified inspector and a Notice of Intent to the Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency, with relief for owner-occupied single-family projects.

Waste and debris

Decide the route before the debris exists: which material, which facility will accept it, who hauls it, and where the container stands while it is full. That last question is a public-way question, and it is the one that catches owners out — a box parked in the street for a fortnight is exactly what the storage-unit and dumpster permit covers in the City of Spokane, and a road obstruction permit in the county.

Two materials travel separately from the rest. Household chemicals and other hazardous items leave by a dedicated drop-off route, which City of Spokane customers reach through the City’s solid waste section rather than the weekly cart. Material that may contain asbestos is an air-agency question, settled before demolition starts rather than at the transfer station.

What the job leaves behind

Keep one file per project: application and permit numbers, inspection results, fee receipts, the scope as written, photos taken from the ground, and the punch list showing who agreed to close each item. The same file answers the next owner’s question, and it is the counterpart to what the permit history guide can and cannot confirm about the work.

Next step

Choose the one exterior job you are actually planning, write its intended start date at the top of a page, and answer the three questions in order: who permits the work that touches the public way, whether a locate has to happen before ground is opened, and what the calendar allows. Any question about a rule read here goes to the counter that issued it; the counters, their portals and their records are listed in the Spokane home project resource router.

Sources

All pages and documents below were opened and read on 4 October 2026.

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