Second story additions in Ballard

Ballard is where Seattle's pop-top tradition lives. The blocks from Adams up through Sunset Hill, Loyal Heights, and Whittier Heights are lined with one-story Craftsman bungalows built for a smaller Ballard — solid houses on fixed lots in a neighborhood people fight to stay in. There is no spare land here, and the lot you own a short walk from the locks or Shilshole is not one you trade away lightly. When a Ballard house runs out of bedrooms, the established local answer is to take it up a story.

A second story in Ballard is fundamentally a structural project. Seattle sits in one of the country's most demanding seismic zones — the Seattle Fault crosses the city and the Cascadia subduction zone sits offshore — so adding a floor of mass above the roofline means engineered shear walls, holdowns, and a continuous load path down to the foundation. And in houses from the 1920s through the 1950s, the foundation itself is the first question: many were never designed for a second floor, and plenty of pre-1980 homes are not even bolted to their foundations. Pacific Pro Group starts every Ballard project with that structural assessment, and where the foundation needs work, it is designed and priced before anything else happens.

Then there is the rain. Seattle gets roughly 150-plus wet days a year, and the question every homeowner here asks is what happens when the roof comes off in October. Our answer is that it never does — the new second floor is framed and fully weatherproofed above your existing roof before the old roof is removed, so the house below stays sealed through the wettest months and your family stays home for the build. Permits run through the Seattle Department of Construction & Inspections, and we manage that process start to finish.

Neighborhoods we serve in Ballard

ZIP codes served: 98107 · 98117