In a builder-grade bath from one of Salmon Creek’s older subdivisions, the trouble that counts almost never shows on the surface. A shower that drains slowly, or a toilet rocking on a worn seal, can wet the framing under the tile for years before a floorboard ever softens underfoot. That hidden water is what we chase down first. This crew made its name rebuilding rot, so the day demo uncovers a soaked joist, the right people are already standing in the room to put it back.
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Remodels completed
Dated finishes come out, the wet walls get a proper seal, and new fixtures go in throughout.
The shower pan gets sealed and leak-tested first, with glass panels mounted only once that layer is signed off, even in a subdivision bathroom barely twenty years old.
Rotted subfloor and soft framing get removed completely and rebuilt with solid new lumber, even in a subdivision home only twenty or thirty years old.
The whole wet zone gets a bonded waterproof layer first, never tile set straight on bare board.
Toilet and vanity go in plumb and level, lighting is wired to code, and the exhaust fan is rated to actually clear humidity in a newer subdivision bathroom.
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 turns bad from behind, not at the polished face you look at each morning. Its life is set by the parts you never see: a waterproof skin pressed flat to the wall, a base that drains rather than ponds, joints that hold their seal, and a fan that genuinely carries wet air out of the house. A rushed, low bid skips every one of those and still looks sharp in a listing photo. We build every wet zone to today’s code and run each fan duct the whole way out through a wall or the roof, because in Salmon Creek the shaded, fir-and-cedar lots hold damp from fall into early summer, and when a fan quietly feeds that moisture into the attic instead, you have bought a rot repair you have not scheduled yet.
Three different systems can sit behind a tiled shower, and the one you end up with, far more than the tile itself, governs how many years pass before moisture finds the studs. Our choice is always a bonded membrane. A sheet good or a trowel-grade liquid gets carried over the cement backer and worked into a single continuous barrier, corners, seams and pipe penetrations included, and the tile beds onto that. A rigid foam approach lands in the same spot by folding the waterproofing into the board itself. The third path, plain backer skimmed with a bit of mastic, tends to let go around fifteen years in, and we simply do not offer it. Cut that one layer to shave the price and you have removed the only thing standing between the water and your framing.
Half of the waterproofing actually lives in the shower floor. The pan needs an even pitch toward the drain, and a no-threshold entry, which is what nearly everybody asks for lately, has to kick that pitch off below the height of the room’s finished floor. Where the house already stands, that means either dropping the joists through that bay or building the surrounding floor up to meet it, a framing call made well ahead of anyone picking up a trowel. It explains why a zero-threshold shower turns into real expense in a settled older home out here, yet barely registers on the bill when the floor is going in from scratch.
The tile you choose is really a question of maintenance. Jumbo porcelain slabs give you hardly any grout to scrub and few joints that can give way, but they demand a substrate flat as glass and cost more hours to hang. Drop to a pebble or small mosaic on the floor and your footing improves when it is wet, at the price of all those added seams. Marble and the other stones look expensive and soak up water readily, so they tie you to a resealing habit you have to actually keep. For grout, run epoxy anywhere a brush and water meet, ordinary grout everywhere else, and lay a flexing sealant, not grout, into each inside corner, because a corner shifts and grout parked in it just cracks.
When you spec the fittings, steer the money toward the valve and let taste take care of all the rest. The part that ends up sealed inside the wall is the mixing valve, whether you pick a pressure-balanced one or a thermostatic one, and that is precisely what you never want to dig back out later, while the handle and spout fixed to its visible face unscrew on any ordinary day. Want a cramped room to feel roomier? Float the vanity off the floor, but solid blocking has to be set between the studs first, a thing decided before the drywall seals it in. And set right beside a shower, in air that stays damp like this, a particleboard cabinet will swell apart within a few years.
The exhaust fan is the last item and the cheapest one on the page, yet it is what stops the room from rotting from the inside. Pick it to suit the square footage, send its duct clear to the outdoors rather than letting it dead-end in the attic, control it with a countdown timer or a humidity switch, and wrap the ductwork so moisture cannot bead up and run back into the fan body. With the firs and cedars holding shade over these yards and the damp hanging on from fall into early summer, a bath that gets no chance to dry between showers will rot like clockwork, and this one cheap part is what tips the whole thing one way or the other.
Here is one of our bathroom projects, halted at the point crews rarely aim a camera. Every finish has come out: the tile and tub, the vanity, the aged flooring, all of it carried off. What remains is one wall of old plank sheathing, batts of insulation drooping between the studs, an open drain stub sticking up where the toilet once fastened down, and the toilet nudged aside into the corner, because it is always the final fixture to be reset.
On the right, new studs already stand where the old wall framing used to be. The supply lines are capped off, and the shower valve already sits pinned at the height it will keep. Leaving that step for later is not an option, because wherever the valve lands sets out the entire tile layout, and the instant the backer hides the wall, the valve and the tile vanish together.
No other stretch of the project shapes the final number, or how long the room lasts, the way this opening does. While it is all still in plain view, we hammer out the decisions that carry weight: how much fall the pan gets, whether the entry comes in level with the floor, where to set the recessed niche, whether a weak joist needs a partner bolted to its side. Once that board is up, every one of those is fixed for keeps. It is the whole reason we have you stand in the space at this moment rather than forwarding a photo after it is all sealed up.
We run across this a lot in Salmon Creek, usually under a shower that twenty or thirty years of daily use has quietly soaked. The difference is what happens after the discovery: this crew does its own structural repair rather than handing it to another outfit. When a joist has gone soft or the subfloor crumbles at a corner, we rebuild it right then, billed from a number you already approved, and the job rolls on instead of freezing while somebody lines up a separate trade.
A familiar handful shows up again and again. There is flex in the floor right at the front of the toilet, the quiet result of a wax ring that let go unnoticed years ago. The joist directly below the shower drain has gone black and spongy under a thumb. A run of rim joist has softened where an overflowing tub wicked water into the wall cavity. And framing along an outside wall has softened in rooms the fan never managed to dry. We cut things open wide enough to turn up all of it while the floor is still exposed, because a joist costs next to nothing to repair only while it lies open like this.
The price answers to a few variables, which tend to land in this order. The biggest is whether the plan moves anything, since relocating a toilet or shower to a different wall means new drain runs beneath the floor. After that come the amount of wall and floor getting tiled, the tier of fixtures you land on, and the condition the floor turns out to be in once it is open. A straight surface refresh that leaves every fixture in place keeps you down near the bottom of the range; a full teardown that reshuffles the layout and carries tile overhead puts you up at the top. Each estimate we send is broken out line by line, and anything we find wrong under the floor is listed on its own for you to approve before we lift a tool. If a rival’s written bid is already in your hand, pass it along, since we match or beat most written bids by 10%.
How the budget divides tends to throw most homeowners, because a bathroom stuffs a surprising lineup of trades into one small room. Labor is the largest piece by far: laying tile is slow, meticulous work billed by the square foot, and a space of perhaps forty square feet must still absorb wiring, plumbing, carpentry, the membrane, the tile, the paint and the trim, one trade after another. The tile and the waterproofing come next, and what they cost follows the surface area you cover, not the size of the room, which is exactly why running tile overhead costs so much more than quitting at shoulder height. Then the fixtures and the vanity, which are completely up to you. Dead last is the plumbing rough, cheap as long as nothing moves and dear the moment a toilet or shower shifts to another wall.
There is one number we will not shave: the waterproofing sitting out of sight behind the tile, and it happens to be among the least expensive things on the whole sheet. Skip that membrane and you keep a couple hundred dollars today in trade for a fix that will run into the thousands down the road, so we refuse to quote it that way, and we would walk away before we set a shower built to rot.
10%
A couple of pictures help, above all of any area that feels spongy or carries a water stain. Get them to us before 5pm and we reply the same day.
A bathroom is a compact room, so the upheaval stays concentrated and short rather than dragging across weeks. Below runs the sequence of it, and the stages that pinch worst when yours is the only bathroom in the house.
The tile, fixtures and vanity are all on hand before a single thing is torn out. A bath left unusable while a late tile shipment crawls in is the most avoidable holdup in the trade. We also pin down where the dust barrier goes up and how the crew will come and go from the room.
Count on a single day, now and then a second. Out go the vanity, tub, wall tile and tired flooring, leaving open framing over bare subfloor, the whole works behind the walls in plain sight at last.
With all of it open, we look over the framing, the subfloor and the tired plumbing. If we find damage, photos reach you the same day, with a price in hand before we cut the next board.
Plumbing and wiring run to where the fixtures will sit, and blocking goes into the studs for a vanity and grab bars. Then the Clark County permit center inspects, since Salmon Creek is unincorporated with no city hall. Nothing is closed back up before it passes.
Backer board goes up first, then a bonded membrane sealed into every corner, seam and pipe, next the pan, and finally the tile, rising up the walls and running across the floor. Tiling is the unhurried part no one can push along, because thinset and grout cure at their own pace and stay deaf to any schedule we hand them.
Last comes the finish work. We set the vanity and toilet, hang the mirror and shower trim, wire in the exhaust fan, and handle paint and trim. Then we step through the room with you, checking each item against what you signed off on. The sink and toilet come back a couple of days before the shower.
The shower is the one piece out of service the whole job, since it has to be demoed, sealed, tiled, and then left alone to cure before anyone steps in. The toilet and sink return much earlier in the run. If this is the single bathroom you have, say so before we begin and we stage the work to bring those two back into use first.
Yes, and we build a steady stream of them around Salmon Creek. Plan on reworked drainage, the full wet area waterproofed, and usually fresh tile up the walls. Pulling the tub also opens the floor underneath, which in one of these older subdivision homes is often where an overflow has quietly fed a soft patch of subfloor for years.
Give at the base of the toilet almost always traces back to a wax ring that failed a while ago, leaving water to seep into the subfloor week after week. The repair is routine, and it costs far less handled now than after another damp winter in these shaded, tree-covered lots pushes the rot further. Send a photo of the spot and we will estimate how far it has traveled.
When the job calls for moving plumbing, getting into the wiring, or rebuilding framing beneath the floor, a permit applies. Salmon Creek sits in unincorporated Clark County, so that paperwork goes through the county permit center, not a city hall, and a wide structural span may need engineered, stamped drawings. Our Washington registration, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC, means we handle the permit and schedule each inspection for you. Keep every fixture in place and skip structural work, and usually none of it is required.
Usually it can be done, but the cost hinges completely on what is framed under the floor. Because the shower base has to start out lower than the surrounding floor, an existing house leaves you two ways to get there: cut the joists down through that bay, or lift the floor around the shower up to its level. Which route is right comes down to how the place was built, and a good number of these subdivision homes give us a crawlspace to judge it from below. Failing that, we cut a small test hole from above.
Working out from the framing: first the backer board, then a bonded waterproof skin worked tight into every corner, joint and pipe that passes through, and only after that the thinset and tile. That skin is the part actually keeping water back. Backer board by itself drinks moisture like any other board, whatever a bargain quote promises at the walkthrough, and leaving it out is the shortcut we run into most.
Here, with fir and cedar shading the yards and the damp clinging on from fall into early summer, the fan matters more than almost any part of the room. Run one undersized, or route its duct into the attic rather than outdoors, and the space holds moisture for hours after you shut the water off. That lingering dampness is what rots the framing and sprouts mold behind a vanity. Matching the size to the room, taking the duct outside through a sidewall or the roof, and running it off a countdown timer or humidity sensor barely moves the bill while the studs are still open.
Figure weeks rather than days for a clean gut and rebuild, and bear in mind a good share of that window is grout and thinset hardening and the wait on an inspector, not a crew idling on site. Reworking the layout or putting rotted framing back stretches it further. Every estimate carries a day count, and when a home has only the single bathroom, we order the work so the toilet and sink are back early in the run.
Our shop sits on SE 184th Ave in east Vancouver, a quick run over to Salmon Creek on the Washington side, I-205 to I-5 with no river to cross, so we reach a bath here fast. We remodel baths across the whole area, the aging 1980s to 2000s subdivisions on their curving streets, the larger custom and view homes out in Felida, the lots backing the greenbelt and the Salmon Creek Greenway, and on through Mount Vista, Lake Shore, Hazel Dell and the neighborhoods around WSU Vancouver and the Legacy medical center.
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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Oregon CCB #262707 · WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MCEvergreen Renewal Services LLC
505 SE 184th Ave Unit 320
Vancouver, WA 98683
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