In an older Camas bathroom, the damage that matters is rarely the damage you can see. A shower that drains slow, or a toilet rocking on a tired wax ring, keeps the framing under the tile wet for years before the floor ever gives. That is the part we chase first. Rot repair is what this crew is known for, so when demo turns up a soaked joist, you already have the right people to rebuild it.
Licensed and insured. WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC
On anything sent before 5pm
We match or beat most written estimates
Remodels completed
Old surfaces out, wet walls sealed the right way, fixtures all new.
Pan set level, glass hung only after the waterproofing behind it has already passed inspection.
Everything the old leak reached comes out and gets rebuilt in solid wood, nothing patched over soft framing.
Every wet surface goes over a bonded membrane first, not onto bare backer board alone.
A fan sized to the room, fixtures set level, a vanity that actually clears the door swing.
Same room, same window. One side is the bathroom the owners lived with. The other is the one they have now.
Drag the handle. Left, the bathroom as we found it: a tub behind a curtain, a small vanity, shelves on the wall. Right, the same room finished: a glass shower, a soaking tub under the window, a wood vanity on a herringbone floor.
Before After A bathroom goes bad from the inside out, not at the glossy surface you look at. The years come down to what you cannot see: a waterproof skin pressed tight against the wall, a base that drains instead of pooling, joints that stay sealed, and an exhaust that genuinely pulls wet air outdoors. A quick, cheap remodel skips every one of those and still photographs fine. We build the wet zones to today’s code and send each fan duct straight through the wall or roof, because the Camas air stays heavy with moisture from fall to early summer, and a fan quietly emptying into your attic is nothing more than a rot repair waiting to be booked.
Every tiled shower rests on one of three approaches, and that choice, not the tile, decides how long you get before water finds the framing. The method we build to is a bonded membrane, either a sheet or a liquid coat, run over backer board and sealed into one continuous skin at every corner, seam and pipe, with tile set on top. A rigid foam system gets there another way, by making the board itself the waterproof layer. The third way, plain cement board with a wipe of mastic, is the one that lets go somewhere around year fifteen, and we do not offer it. The layer you would be skipping is the only one standing between your shower and the subfloor.
The base is where the other half of the waterproofing lives. Water has to run off a shower floor at a steady fall toward the drain, and the step-free entry everyone wants these days has to begin that fall below the level of the room around it. In a house that already stands, getting there usually means cutting the floor joists down across that span or framing them lower, which is carpentry settled long before a trowel comes out. That is the reason a flush entry costs real money in an older Camas home and almost nothing once a floor is being framed fresh.
The tile you pick is mostly a question of upkeep. Big porcelain panels leave few grout lines, so there is less to scrub and fewer seams to fail, though they want a dead-flat wall behind them and cost more to hang. A mosaic floor underfoot grips better wet but trades you back all those joints to maintain. Stone is handsome and thirsty, so a marble shower ties you to a sealing habit you cannot let slide. Run epoxy grout where water and scrubbing meet, ordinary grout everywhere else, and a flexible sealant, not grout, at every inside corner, since those joints move and grout only cracks.
When it comes to fittings, spend where it counts, in the valve, and let taste guide everything else. The mixing valve, pressure-balanced or thermostatic, is the part entombed in the wall; reopening it later is the headache worth avoiding, while the lever and spout screwed to the face of it swap out on any weekday morning. Hang a vanity off the wall and a tight room breathes easier, but the studs need solid backing put in first, so you settle that before the drywall closes. And beside a shower in air this wet, a cabinet built from particleboard is good for maybe five years.
Last comes the exhaust fan, the smallest number on the quote and the one thing that keeps the whole room healthy. Pick it for the room’s size, carry the duct all the way outdoors rather than letting it empty into the attic, put it on a countdown switch or a moisture sensor, and lag the ductwork so it will not weep condensation back into the housing. Camas air sits damp the better part of the year, so a bathroom that never gets a chance to dry between showers will rot like clockwork, and that one fan is the difference between the two futures.
Every bathroom we rebuild passes through a stage that never makes the finished photos. The tile, the tub, the vanity and the flooring are all gone, and what is left is bare framing, insulation between the studs, the open drain where the toilet used to bolt down, and old sheathing that has been hiding behind the walls for years.
That is when water damage shows itself. Studs that a shower has fed season after season get replaced outright rather than patched, the supply lines are capped, and the shower valve is set at its final height, a step that cannot wait, because that valve sets where every tile lands and both of them disappear the moment the backer board covers the wall.
No stretch of the job decides more about the final bill or the room’s lifespan than this one. While the walls stand open, every decision worth making gets settled: how steeply the base drains, whether the entry goes flush to the floor, where the recessed niche will sit, whether a weak joist gets a partner bolted beside it. Once the board hides it, the decision is locked. That is exactly why we bring you into the room at this point rather than mailing a photo along after it is buttoned up.
In Camas we meet it often enough, especially under showers that have been in daily use twenty-odd years. What changes the story is the step after the discovery: putting rotted framing back is our own line of work, never a call to some other outfit. Turn up a punky joist or a soft stretch of subfloor and it gets rebuilt properly, at a number you already saw sitting on the estimate, so the schedule keeps rolling rather than freezing while a second trade is tracked down.
The usual suspects repeat from one house to the next. There is often a give in the floor just ahead of the toilet, left by a wax seal that quit long ago with nobody the wiser. A joist beneath the shower drain has gone dark and soft. A length of rim joist has turned punky where water from a tub overflow has crept into the cavity behind the wall. And framing along an outside wall softens wherever the fan never moved much air. We pull things open wide enough to find all of it while the floor is up, since that is the only moment repairing a joist stays cheap.
A few things move the figure, more or less in this sequence. First, does anything relocate, because sending a toilet or a shower to a new spot means fresh drain lines. Then the square footage of tile going on the walls and floor, the tier of fixtures you settle on, and whatever the floor reveals the day it opens up. Hold everything where it is and freshen the surfaces, and you land near the bottom of the range. Tear it down, rearrange it, and carry tile up to the ceiling, and you land at the top. We itemize every estimate, and if the floor hides damage, that repair shows as a separate line you okay before any of it happens. Already sitting on a written bid from someone else? We will match or beat most of them by 10%.
How that money divides up surprises most homeowners, because a bathroom crams a startling number of trades into a few square feet. The lion’s share is labor: setting tile is slow, exacting work priced per square foot, and a space of maybe forty square feet still has to take on electrical, plumbing, framing, membrane, tile, paint and trim carpentry, each in turn. Behind labor sit the tile and the waterproofing, and those track the area you cover rather than the room itself, which is why taking tile up to the ceiling runs so far past stopping at your shoulders. Fixtures and the vanity come after that, fully your choice. The plumbing rough-in lands last, inexpensive when nothing shifts and steep once a toilet or a shower changes address.
The one figure we will never trim is the waterproofing tucked behind the tile, which also happens to be one of the cheapest items on the page. Leave that membrane off and you pocket a couple hundred dollars now against a repair that climbs into the thousands later, so we will not price it like that, and we would sooner lose the work than put a shower in the ground that way.
10%
Snap a few photos, especially of any spot that gives underfoot or shows a water stain. Send it before 5pm and you hear back the same day.
A bathroom is a small room, so the upheaval stays tight and quick instead of dragging on for weeks. Here is the order it follows, and the stretches that bite hardest when it is the one bathroom you have.
We get the tile, fixtures and vanity ordered and in hand before demo. A bath left out of commission waiting on a backordered tile box is the most needless holdup there is. We also set where the dust barrier hangs and the route the crew uses to reach the room.
A day, now and then two. Out come the tub, tile, vanity and old floor, and the room drops back to bare studs and subfloor so everything behind them shows at once.
With it all exposed, we go over the framing, subfloor and aging plumbing. Turn up damage and you get photos that same day, plus a price in hand before the next board is cut.
Plumbing and wiring run to their new spots, blocking set for the vanity and grab bars, then the City of Camas Building Division inspects from its NE 4th Avenue office. Nothing is covered until it passes.
Up goes the backer board, then the membrane with every corner and pipe sealed, next the pan, then up the walls and out over the floor. Tiling is the slow stretch, the one nobody can rush, because thinset and grout set on their own clock, not on a schedule we hand them.
Now the room gets dressed: vanity and toilet set, shower trim and mirror hung, the fan wired, then paint and trim. After that we walk it through with you against what you signed. The sink and toilet usually return to use several days before the shower does.
The shower stays out of use for the whole job, since it needs demo, waterproofing, tile and curing time. The toilet and sink come back much earlier in the run. If yours is the only bathroom in the house, say so before we begin and we order the work to bring those two back first.
Yes, and we do plenty of them around Camas. Expect new drain work, the whole wet area waterproofed, and usually fresh tile on the walls. It is also your chance to handle what the tub hid, often a soft patch of subfloor near downtown fed by an overflow for years.
A floor that flexes at the base of the toilet almost always means a wax ring let go a while back and water has been feeding the subfloor ever since. It is a routine repair, and much cheaper now than after another wet winter. Send a photo of the spot and we will estimate how far it has spread.
If we are relocating plumbing, touching the wiring, or repairing structural framing under the floor, then yes, and that permit runs through the City of Camas Building Division on NE 4th Avenue, not the county. We are a registered Washington contractor, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC, so we pull it and book the inspections ourselves. Swap fixtures in the same spots with no structural work and you generally will not need one.
In most homes it works, but the price swings entirely on what the floor is sitting on. A no-threshold shower needs its base set below the height of the surrounding floor, so in a house that already stands you are looking at one of two moves: trimming the joists down across that span, or raising the floor around it up to the same level. Which path makes sense depends on your floor, and we will know after a look from the crawlspace below or a small opening cut from above.
Working outward from the framing, it is backer board first, next a bonded waterproof skin locked down at corners, joints and every pipe through it, and only then thinset and tile. That skin is what actually holds water back. Backer board alone soaks through like anything else, whatever a budget bid promises at the walkthrough, and leaving that skin out is the shortcut we see most.
Here, with damp lingering most of the year, the fan matters more than almost any other part. Undersize it, or vent its duct into the attic instead of outdoors, and the room stays wet for hours after the shower stops. That trapped moisture is what feeds rot in the framing and mold behind the cabinet. Sizing it right, ducting to open air through a wall or roof, and wiring it to a countdown timer or a moisture sensor costs next to nothing with the walls still stripped.
Count on weeks rather than days for a clean gut and rebuild, and know that much of that window is grout and thinset curing and waiting on the inspector, not a crew standing idle. Rearranging the layout or fixing rotted framing pushes it out further. Your estimate comes with a day count attached, and when the house has just the one bathroom, we arrange the order of work so the toilet and sink come back early on.
Our shop sits on SE 184th Ave in east Vancouver, a quick run west to Camas with no bridge to cross, so we get to a Camas bathroom fast. We remodel baths all over the map here, the early-1900s homes down by Crown Park and downtown, the newer places up on Prune Hill and out in Camas Meadows, the lower lots near Lacamas Lake, and on into Washougal and the rest of east Clark County.
Three of the 50 reviews on our Google profile, in the homeowners' own words.
David's work was terrific. Repaired a rotted out structural framing issue in a bathroom and replaced (and resized!) a window in the same space. He initially quoted a two day job but was able to finish in a single day. Dedicated! Will be using him again.
Joe H.Bathroom framing repair
Evergreen crew installed three skylights for us. Once we opened the ceiling there was more to do than expected and they handled it without drama. Clean work, fair price, and they cleaned up after themselves.
Foad M.Three skylights
David the owner came by for a quote and was able to get us scheduled right away. The communication was great with his team and the guys were on time and very professional. Would highly recommend.
Scott G.Kitchen nook bench
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Built for the wet side of the river.
Licensed and insured remodeling contractor serving Vancouver, WA and the Portland metro.
Oregon CCB #262707 · WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MCEvergreen Renewal Services LLC
505 SE 184th Ave Unit 320
Vancouver, WA 98683
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