In an older Ridgefield bathroom, the damage that counts is seldom the kind you can point to. A shower that empties slowly, or a toilet rocking on a wax ring that quit seasons back, soaks the framing beneath the tile long before the surface shows a thing. Down in the river bottoms off Lake River, the standing ground damp only stretches that out. Opening those walls and tracing the wet to its source is where we start, because putting rotted framing back together is the job this crew is known for.
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We match or beat most written estimates
Remodels completed
Dated surfaces gone, wet walls sealed as they should be, all new fixtures.
Out comes the tub, in goes the waterproofing, and only once that passes inspection do the pan and glass get set.
A hidden leak does more damage near the refuge’s river-bottom damp, so every softened stud and section of subfloor gets cut out and rebuilt solid.
A bonded membrane seals every wet surface before any tile, never tile set on bare backer board.
The vanity sits where the door swings without hitting it, the toilet and lighting go in plumb, and exhaust gets sized up for the fog off the refuge.
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 rots from the inside out, never at the shiny face you study each morning. Its years are set by the things you cannot see: a waterproof skin bonded flat to the wall, a base that sheds water toward the drain instead of ponding it, corners and joints that hold their seal, and an exhaust that genuinely carries wet air outdoors. A fast, cheap remodel ignores every one of those and still looks sharp in a photo. We build the wet areas to code as it stands and run each fan’s duct the whole way outside through a sidewall or the roof, because in Ridgefield the low fog off Lake River and the refuge holds damp against the house for most of the year, and a fan quietly dumping that moisture into your attic is just a rot repair nobody has booked yet.
Three building methods sit behind any tiled shower, and which one you get, far more than the tile on show, governs how many years pass before moisture touches wood. Ours is a bonded membrane: a sheet product or a trowel-applied liquid, carried over the backer board and tied into one seamless barrier at corners, joints and every pipe, with the tile bedded on top. A rigid foam setup lands in the same place by a different road, folding the waterproofing straight into the board. Then there is the cheap road, plain cement board skimmed with mastic, which gives up somewhere near its fifteenth year, and it is not on our menu. Trim that layer to save a dollar and you have pulled the one barrier holding water out of the floor.
The floor of the shower carries the other half of the job. Its base must drop toward the drain on an even grade, and a no-step entry, the thing nearly everyone asks for lately, needs that grade kicked off beneath the finished floor of the rest of the room. Where a house is already framed, two moves get you there: cut the joists down through that bay, or sling them lower from the start. Either is a framing question answered long before tile is on anyone’s mind. It explains why a flush shower costs real money inside a century-old home off Main Avenue, yet hardly adds a dime when the floor is going down new in one of the subdivisions filling in around the schools.
Tile, in the end, is a call about how much cleaning you sign up for. Oversized porcelain slabs mean next to no grout to scrub and few joints that can give way, but the substrate behind them must be flat as glass and the labor to hang them runs higher. Drop to a small mosaic on the floor and your footing improves when it is wet, at the cost of every one of those added seams. Natural stone looks the part and soaks up water just as eagerly, so putting marble in a shower signs you up for resealing you actually have to keep doing. Epoxy grout earns its place anywhere a brush and water meet; standard grout handles the rest; and inside corners want a flexing sealant, never grout, because a joint that moves will crack grout every time.
When you spec the fittings, the valve is where the dollars belong and everything downstream can follow your taste. Buried in the wall sits the mixing valve, pressure-balanced or thermostatic, and that is the piece you never want to reopen once it is closed in, whereas the trim handle and spout screwed onto its face swap out on an idle Tuesday. Hanging the vanity off the wall can make a cramped room feel wider, provided solid blocking gets fastened into the studs ahead of time, a thing you decide before the drywall seals it away. And a cabinet built of particleboard, parked right next to a shower in air this wet, has maybe five good years in it.
That leaves the exhaust fan, the lowest number anywhere on the estimate and the one component that keeps the whole room from failing. Spec it to the room’s volume, run its duct all the way to open air instead of surrendering it to the attic, tie it to a timer or a moisture sensor, and lag the duct so condensation does not weep back down into the housing. For most of the calendar the Ridgefield air holds its moisture, and the fog that creeps up off the refuge leaves shaded walls reluctant to dry, so any bathroom that cannot dry out between showers will rot like clockwork. The whole of that difference rides on one modest fan.
Here is an actual bathroom frozen at the point nobody bothers to photograph. The finishes are all out: tile, tub, vanity and worn flooring, hauled to the curb. Behind them stands a wall of old board sheathing, insulation slumped loose in the stud cavities, an open drain poking up bare where the toilet once sat, and the toilet set aside in the corner, since it is the very last thing to return.
The new framing is the stretch on the right. Rather than patch that wall, we swapped in all new studs, which is what a wall has earned once a shower has been leaking into it. You can see the capped supply lines and the shower valve, already set at the exact height it will live at. That cannot be left for later, because the position of the valve drives the whole tile layout, and once the backer board goes on, valve and tile both disappear from view.
Nothing anywhere else in the project weighs on the final number, or on how long the room survives, the way this opening does. Everything is visible right now, so this is when we hash out the decisions that count: how much slope to give the pan, whether the shower goes thresholdless, the spot for the recessed niche, whether a soft joist gets a partner sistered to it. The minute that board goes up, each of those is settled permanently. It is the reason we walk you through the space in person at this stage instead of emailing you a picture once it is all closed in.
We come across it regularly in Ridgefield, especially under a shower that has been in daily service two decades or longer. The thing that matters is what follows the discovery: structural rebuilding is the specialty this shop was built on, never something we hand off to another crew. Find a joist gone punky or a patch of subfloor turned soft, and we rebuild it on the spot at a rate you already saw on your estimate, so nothing grinds to a halt while someone hunts down a second trade.
House after house, it comes down to a familiar few. First, there is flooring that yields underfoot at the front of the toilet, the quiet work of a wax seal that let go ages back. Directly beneath the shower drain, a joist has gone dark and gives to a thumb. The rim joist has softened along a stretch where water from an overflowing tub has wicked into the wall, which turns up often in the low lots near the refuge where the soil holds moisture for months on end. Framing against an outside wall goes soft, too, in any room whose fan barely stirred the air. We open the floor far enough to turn up every last bit while it is still accessible, because a joist is only cheap to mend while it sits exposed.
Several things nudge the total up or down, and they tend to land in this sequence. Number one is movement: relocate a toilet or a shower and you are paying to run new drain lines beneath the floor. Behind that sit the amount of wall and floor you plan to tile, the tier of fixtures you settle on, and whatever shape the floor is in once it is opened. A straight refresh with everything staying put keeps you near the bottom of the range; a full gut that reshuffles the layout and carries tile overhead puts you at the top. Our estimates come broken out line by line, and any damage we uncover is written as a separate item you sign off on before we proceed. If a written bid from another outfit is already in your hands, pass it along, since we match or beat most of them by 10%.
The way the budget breaks down throws most owners, because a bathroom squeezes a startling roster of trades into a handful of square feet. The heaviest line, and it is not close, is labor: tile goes down slowly and precisely, charged by the foot, and even forty-odd square feet has to make room for framing, pipe, wire, membrane, tile, paint and finish carpentry, each in sequence. Materials for tile and waterproofing follow, scaled to how much surface gets covered rather than the room’s size, which is exactly why running tile to the ceiling dwarfs stopping at shoulder height. Fixtures and the vanity are next, and those sit entirely in your hands. Dead last comes the plumbing rough, cheap as long as nothing shifts and dear the instant a fixture changes walls.
There is a single figure we refuse to trim, the waterproofing hidden under the tile, and it is also one of the smallest on the whole sheet. Dropping that membrane hands you back a couple hundred dollars now in exchange for a repair that runs into the thousands down the road, so we decline to price it that way. We would rather lose the job to someone else than bury a shower built to fail.
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Take a couple of photos, most of all of any spot that flexes underfoot or carries a stain. Send them in before 5pm and we answer the same day.
A bathroom is a tight space, so the disruption stays concentrated and brief rather than stretched across weeks. Below is the order the work runs in, and which stages sting worst when you have no backup bathroom.
The tile, fixtures and vanity are ordered and in the shop before any demo begins. Nothing holds a bathroom out of use more pointlessly than a backordered box of tile. We also settle where the dust wall hangs and the path the crew takes in and out of the room.
Figure a day, occasionally two. The tub, tile, vanity and old flooring come out, and the room drops to bare studs and subfloor, every surface behind them laid open at once.
With all of it exposed, we check the framing, the subfloor and the tired old plumbing. Find anything damaged and photos reach you that day, with a number attached before we cut another board.
Supply lines and wiring run to the new fixture spots, blocking set for the vanity and any grab bars, then an inspection, through the City of Ridgefield inside the limits or Clark County out on the acreage. Nothing gets covered until it passes.
Backer board first, then a bonded membrane with every corner, seam and pipe sealed off, next the pan, and then the tile, working up the walls and across the floor. The tiling is the stretch that refuses to be rushed, since thinset and grout set to a clock of their own and pay no mind to ours.
Now the finish work: vanity and toilet set, mirror and shower trim hung, the fan wired, then paint and trim carpentry. After that we walk the room together, checking each line against the estimate you signed off on. The sink and toilet are back in use several days ahead of the shower.
The shower is the one piece out of action for the full job, because it gets demoed, sealed, tiled, and then has to sit and cure before it can be used. The toilet and sink return well before then. When a home has only the single bathroom, let us know before we start, and we sequence things so those two are up and running first.
Yes, and we build plenty of them around Ridgefield. Count on reworked drainage, the whole wet area sealed, and usually fresh tile up the walls. Pulling the tub also opens the floor beneath it, often the very spot where an older downtown home hides subfloor softened by years of overflow nobody noticed.
When the floor has some give right where the toilet sits, the usual cause is a wax ring that failed a while back, letting water seep into the subfloor week after week. It is a routine fix, and much less costly caught now than after one more damp winter in the lowlands by the river. Snap a picture of the area and we will estimate how far the damage reaches.
If the plan moves plumbing, opens up wiring, or rebuilds structural framing beneath the floor, then a permit applies. Within Ridgefield city limits, the City of Ridgefield Community Development Department handles it; out on the unincorporated acreage, that duty falls to Clark County for both the permit and the inspections. Our Washington contractor registration, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC, lets us pull the paperwork and schedule every inspection ourselves. Keep the fixtures in place and skip structural work, and more often than not you need no permit.
In most homes, yes, though the price hinges entirely on what sits under the floor. A step-free base has to start lower than the surrounding floor, so in a house already built you are choosing between two moves: trimming the joists down over that span, or raising the rest of the floor up to meet it. Which one fits depends on the framing, and plenty of the rural homes out here have a crawlspace we can read it from. Otherwise we open a small hole from above.
Picture the wall from the framing forward. First the backer board, over it a bonded waterproof membrane worked tight into every corner, seam and pipe, and the thinset and tile only once that skin is complete. The waterproofing is what holds water back; the board alone does not. Cement board drinks moisture the way plain board does, no matter the promises a bargain quote makes, which is why skipping that membrane is the oldest shortcut in the trade.
In a town this damp, with fog settling into the lowlands and shaded walls that dry slowly, the exhaust fan does more for the room than almost anything else. Build it too small, or let its duct empty into the attic rather than outside, and the space stays soaked for hours once the shower is off. Moisture left sitting that way is what breeds rot in the studs and mold behind a cabinet. Getting the size right, carrying the duct out through a wall or the roof, and switching it off a timer or humidity sensor adds little while the framing is still bare.
Plan in weeks, not days, for a full gut and rebuild. A fair piece of that stretch is nobody working at all, just grout and thinset hardening and the wait for an inspector to show. Move the layout around or put rotted framing back, and the finish slides later still. Each estimate lists a day count, and if yours is the only bathroom in the house, we stage the job to bring the sink and toilet back early.
Our shop sits on SE 184th Ave in east Vancouver, a straight run north up I-5 with no river to cross, so we reach a Ridgefield bathroom fast. We remodel baths all over town, the pre-1930 homes up on the bluff around Pioneer Street and Main Avenue, the fast-growing new subdivisions spreading out toward the schools, the low-lying places down near the Lake River waterfront, the rural acreage on wells and septic out past the edges of the city, and on through the rest of north 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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