Drying a lakefront housewhen the ground stays wet too

Inland, a drying job has a clear end point: stop the leak, remove the water and dry what got wet. Next to the lake, there can be a second source that nobody can turn off. When the lake is high, the ground around a shoreline house can stay saturated, and moisture keeps rising into any crawlspace above that ground. It does not mean the job cannot be done. It means the plan has to separate what can be finished now from what has to wait.

This is more than a theoretical concern. Everett Herald reporting described a shoreline household with nearly a foot of standing water on the lawn over two winters, and a 2020 outlet study found that in the wet season the outlet channel's size sets how fast the lake can fall, not the weir. ^[1] So a lake that rises in a December storm may not fall for quite some time. Ask how the contractor intends to handle that, rather than assuming the same schedule as a job on the hill.

The general mechanics are explained on our main structural drying page. What follows is about how they change on a lot beside the water.

People who live on the water like to open up the house, and in July that is a fine idea. In the wet months it usually is not. Published 1991-2020 normals from an Everett station about six miles west show November near 5.8 inches and December and January near 5, and modelled Open-Meteo figures for Lake Stevens read much higher, though those may overstate things. On a raw, rainy day the air outside can already be close to saturated. Letting it in means your dehumidifier spends its time on outdoor air instead of the moisture in your walls.

An easy way to test it is to compare the humidity and temperature inside and out. A contractor will often do this with a thermo-hygrometer, and it is reasonable to ask for the numbers. If the indoor air is drier, keep the windows shut. In a dry spell, the answer might change. The EPA's household target of below 60 percent humidity, ideally 30 to 50, is the long-term aim once the job is finished. ^[5] During drying, equipment commonly pulls the air lower.

A dry reading in the living room is not the end of the job if the floor framing below is still wet. Ask to see readings on the joists and subfloor from below, as well as from the rooms above. Readings should be compared with unaffected material of the same kind in your own house. Keep the records, as they will help if you have to explain to an insurer why a second visit was needed. Check too that any contractor you use is registered through Washington L&I's Verify tool. ^[7]

Then think about what comes next. A shoreline home may get wet again in a future winter, so this is a good time to ask if replacement materials on the lowest levels could be more tolerant of water, and whether anything stored low should move up.