Faucet Repair & Installation in Everett, WA

Four faucet mechanisms live under that handle

Before anything gets taken apart, we work out which one you have. You can usually narrow it down yourself from the handle alone.

Valve type	How you can tell	What wears out	Usual fix
Compression	Two handles that keep tightening the harder you turn; typical of older fixtures	The rubber washer and the brass seat it presses against	Washer & seat
Ball	A single handle swivelling in a rounded dome, common on kitchen sinks of a certain era	Springs, rubber seats, and the slotted ball itself	Rebuild kit
Cartridge	One or two handles that lift and turn smoothly, with no tightening feel	The cartridge, most often its O-rings	Cartridge swap
Ceramic disc	One handle on a wide cylindrical body; the action feels solid and short	Inlet seals, or the discs themselves once grit scores them	New seals

Identification is not academic. Cartridges are brand-specific and frequently model-specific, so a Moen part will not save a Delta, and two faucets from the same maker a few years apart can take different stems. Getting this wrong is how a simple job turns into three trips.

Local water shapes which of these fails first. Everett draws its municipal supply from the Sultan Basin up in the Cascades, and that water is on the soft side, which is fairly kind to rubber seals. Homes on private wells around Snohomish, Monroe and the outskirts of Lake Stevens live under different rules: sediment and iron move through the lines, and grit is what scores a ceramic disc or cuts a groove in a brass seat. Meanwhile the older housing stock across north Everett and central Marysville still carries plenty of two-handle compression valves, which are cheap to rebuild and genuinely worth rebuilding.

Where lead at a tap actually comes from here

Everett has eliminated lead lines and connections from its distribution system, so the water arriving at your property line is not the source. The city states plainly that lead measured at a household tap “is most likely due to the corrosion of household plumbing systems” — the fixtures, solder and supply lines inside the house. Everett’s most recent monitoring round tested 108 homes and returned a 90th-percentile result of 2 parts per billion against an EPA action level of 15 ppb, with the highest single reading at 10 ppb. It is a good result, and it also locates responsibility precisely: on older fixtures and the brass behind them, which is exactly what gets replaced during a faucet swap.

Source: City of Everett, Lead and Copper Inventory (everettwa.gov), Everett WA, 2021 monitoring round, pulled Aug 2026. EPA action level per the federal Lead and Copper Rule.

Where the water shows up tells us what broke

Three complaints cover nearly everything people call about, and each points somewhere different.

A drip from the spout

This is a sealing failure inside the valve. The tap is off, the handle is off, and water gets past anyway. On a compression faucet it is the washer, or the seat that the washer closes onto, which by then has usually gone rough enough to eat new washers. On a cartridge or disc faucet it is the cartridge or the inlet seals. The distinction people miss: a drip that continues indefinitely is a valve problem, while a few drops right after shutoff and then nothing is often just the spout emptying itself.

A leaking faucet base

Water appearing around the bottom of the handle or collecting on the deck while the tap is running points at O-rings, not the valve seal. On a kitchen faucet with a swivelling spout, the O-rings around the spout body are the usual suspects, and they leak only when the water is on. This is the failure people mop up for months without reporting it, because a wet counter reads as splashing. It is not splashing, and left alone the water works its way under the sink deck and into the cabinet.

A puddle in the cabinet

Under-sink water is the one worth taking seriously the same day, because the cabinet floor hides it while the particleboard drinks it. The candidates are the supply connections at the shutoffs, the mounting nuts on the faucet shanks, the sprayer hose and its quick-connect, and the drain assembly, which has nothing to do with the faucet at all. If everything at the fixture is dry and the cabinet still gets wet, the source is further back in the wall, and that is where we switch to the equipment that finds hidden leaks instead of guessing at fittings.

Faucet repair first, or is the fixture the problem?

We repair by default. A faucet body that is sound and a mechanism with parts still in production is a repair, and a rebuilt quality fixture will generally outlive a budget replacement bought to end the argument. Solid brass bodies from the better manufacturers are worth keeping, and many of those makers back their cartridges long after the sink has stopped looking new.

Replacement earns its place in a few specific situations. Once the body itself is cracked or the casting has corroded through, no part fixes that. When parts for the mechanism are discontinued, which happens quickly with builder-grade fixtures installed by the pallet in the newer subdivisions around Mill Creek and Lake Stevens, a repair becomes a scavenger hunt. When a faucet is leaking from the spout, the base and the supply connection all at once, the fixture is telling you something. And when the finish has pitted through to the metal, cosmetics and function usually failed on the same schedule.

In a kitchen the decision rarely stays about the faucet. Sink type, sprayer configuration, filtered-water lines and disposal clearances all interact, which is why the choice sits inside the wider kitchen plumbing picture rather than off on its own. We will tell you which way we would go and why, and the recommendation does not change based on which one pays better.

Between service calls, faucets ask for very little maintenance, and the little they ask for pays for itself. Unscrew the aerator every few months and rinse the screen — weak flow at one tap is usually grit sitting in that screen rather than a valve on its way out. Work the shutoffs under the sink open and closed once a year so they do not seize in the position you least want them in. Dry the deck rather than leaving water standing around the base, because that is what creeps under the mount and swells a cabinet top from the inside. And when a handle starts feeling gritty, book the service then: a cartridge pulled early comes out whole, while faucets left to grind for another season weld it into the body and turn a twenty-minute job into an extraction.

Faucet installation services, and the parts of the job that go sideways

Swapping a faucet looks like a short job right up until it meets the reality under the sink. Two things account for most of the trouble.

The first is the shutoff. Modern quarter-turn stops are dependable. The older multi-turn valves found under sinks in a lot of Everett, Edmonds and Mountlake Terrace homes seize in place with the packing dried hard, and the act of closing one is frequently what makes it start weeping. So on an older house we assume the stops are candidates for replacement and say so before anything is dismantled, because the gap between swapping a faucet and shutting down the water to the whole house is not a conversation anyone wants to have mid-job.

The second is hole spacing, which quietly decides what you are allowed to buy. Sinks and countertops come drilled single-hole, centerset, or widespread, and a replacement has to respect what is already cut. A single-hole faucet can be fitted to a three-hole sink with a deck plate. Going the other direction, from one hole to three, means new drilling or a new sink. Undermount basins on stone counters add their own difficulty: everything is reached blind from below with a basin wrench.

Find the water

Where it appears, when it appears, and with the handle in which position.

Identify the valve

Brand, model and mechanism, so the right parts turn up the first time.

Price it in writing

Repair or replace, both laid out, before a wrench goes anywhere near it.

Do the work

Rebuild or install, plus the shutoffs and supply lines if they are past it.

Test and tidy

Run it hot and cold, check every joint under pressure, dry the cabinet.

New fixture already sitting in the box?

Bring your own faucet and we will install it. We will also tell you honestly if the supply lines or stops underneath should be replaced while the cabinet is open.

Faucet questions we hear most weeks

Why does my faucet still drip after I replaced the washer?

Usually because the brass seat under the washer is worn. Once that surface is pitted or grooved it chews through a new washer quickly. The seat has to be reground or replaced along with the washer, or the faucet may not be a compression type at all, in which case a washer was never the right part.

Is it worth repairing a faucet or should I just replace it?

If the body is sound and parts are still available, repair is usually the better value, especially with a quality brass fixture. Replace it when the body is cracked or corroded, when parts have been discontinued, or when it is leaking from several places at once.

How much does faucet repair cost in Everett?

It depends on the mechanism and on whether the shutoff valves and supply lines also need work. Nobody publishes an Everett or Seattle price for faucet repair on its own, so treat the numbers loosely: a single national source, Thumbtack, puts a simple dripping-faucet fix at $65 to $150, and Puget Sound labour runs above national averages. Replacement is better documented, at $250 to $586 across the Seattle metro per Angi — that figure covers kitchen faucets, and bath and tub fittings run somewhat higher on labour. Both pulled August 2026. You get a written price before anything is taken apart.

Can you fix a leak at the base of the faucet without replacing it?

Usually yes. A leak at the base is normally worn O-rings around the spout or valve body, and those are replaceable parts on most fixtures.

The shutoff valve under my sink will not turn. What now?

Stop before you force it, because forcing a seized stop is how a small job becomes a flooded cabinet. We shut the water off further upstream, replace the stop with a quarter-turn valve, and carry on with the original repair.