Where we spend our days
Rot is water damage that waits to be found, and the homes around Hazel Dell give it plenty of time. Much of the neighborhood went up as ranch and post-war houses between the 1950s and the 1970s along the Highway 99 corridor, so the siding, trim and window flashing taking the weather today are often the original materials, now decades past their prime. Over that sits a tall, mature tree canopy that keeps sun off north walls, roofs and decks and lets moss and damp hang on through the wet season, while the lower lots toward Burnt Bridge Creek pull moisture up out of the ground. Fixing rot so it stays fixed means running the leak back to its start, cutting the wood well past the last soft fiber, and rebuilding whatever carries load before a board of siding goes back up. It is the heart of what we do, and the work people call us for by name.
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On anything sent before 5pm
We match or beat most written estimates
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Give water month after month of damp weather and it finds nearly every outside joint a house has, and under this tree canopy a shaded wall rarely sees the sun it needs to dry between storms. On the older homes around Hazel Dell, here is where it turns up first, and what we open up most:
These take the brunt of the weather before anything else does. Corner boards that have wicked soft at the bottom, the trim wrapping every window and door, the belly band and water table running across the wall, and whatever sheathing is hiding in behind.
Decking that gives underfoot, the joists and beams carrying it, and the ledger that pins the whole deck to the house. Many decks here are twenty to forty years along, sitting under heavy shade that loads them with moss and fallen needles much of the year, and the ledger, wet longest, is first to fail.
Sill plates, rim joists, studs and post bases that have spent years drinking moisture out of damp ground. We meet it most in the older crawlspaces under the lower lots down toward Burnt Bridge and Cougar Creek, where the soil never really dries out.
The metal meant to keep water out from around a window or door, long past doing it, so every rain has slipped in behind the casing for years. On a wall the canopy holds in shade, that trapped damp simply sits.
A toilet seal or a shower pan leaking slowly for months on end, soaking the aged subfloor and the joists beneath, and in a mid-century bath that goes unnoticed until a patch of floor finally gives.
Take a couple of photos, add a line about what you are looking at, and send them over. Anything that reaches us before 5pm gets a reply the same day, and if it turns out to be a job for a different trade, we will tell you straight and point you the right way.
On rot work this is the only proof that means anything. A finished photo shows a wall. A pair shows what was behind it.
Drag the handle. The shower alcove at demolition, its framing darkened by water, next to the finished room: a glass enclosure, a tiled half wall and a niche set into the back wall.
Before After The visible damage is the least of it. Rot eats through the inside of the board, screened by paint and siding, so a stain coming through or a soft patch underfoot sits at the far edge of the problem and not its source. After decades of shade and damp on these older walls, the distance between the two can be wide. A price built on a photograph is a guess dressed up as a number, and it unravels into a change order the day the wall comes apart.
That is the reason we drive out and inspect it by hand. Standing at the wall, we separate what we already know from what the opening alone can reveal, then write the bid to match: a committed figure for the known work, and a clearly marked allowance for the hidden part that goes nowhere without your go-ahead. Nothing about which dollars are fixed is left vague, since the paperwork lays it out plainly.
The mid-century homes along the Highway 99 corridor are old enough that most have already been through at least one round of trim or siding work, not always done the same way twice. That patchwork history is a big part of why the damage under the paint can vary so much from one house to the next.
Cutting the rot away is only the first half. The half that decides whether we see this corner again in ten years is what we set back into it.
The first aim is to make the new wood disappear into the old, because a repair you can still spot a year on is a repair done poorly. If a 1960s ranch along the corridor still wears its original cedar corner boards, cedar is what goes back, cut to the same profile. Where that profile left the catalogs long ago, we build it up out of stock lumber until its face and reveal fall in line with the runs on either side.
Cedar and redwood last on the oils locked into the heartwood, though the sapwood milled into a board today is nothing like the old growth it replaces. Primed finger-jointed pine runs cheap and paints up clean, yet it surrenders fast anywhere it stays wet, and beneath this canopy that is most of the calendar, so it stays up off the dirt and off the bottom of a trim run. Cellular PVC and fiber-cement trim never rot, which is why they earn their place at the details that keep giving out: the foot of a corner board, a water table, the casing under a window hung without head flashing. The cost per foot is higher, and it saves you a third trip to the same corner.
Framing is its own call. Anything bearing on concrete or riding low near grade goes back as pressure-treated, since bare fir laid against a damp foundation is exactly how the first sill plate gave out. A sistered joist or a fresh stud is Douglas fir, sized and fastened to shoulder the load the old piece carried, not merely to fill the gap.
Fasteners earn more thought than they get. The copper in today’s treated lumber chews through plain galvanized steel, so anything driven into treated stock or cedar comes in stainless or hot-dipped galvanized. Sink an ordinary screw into a cedar board and black streaks weep down the face inside a season, and no coat of paint hides them afterward.
Every piece is primed on all six faces before it is ever fastened up, the sawn ends along with the flats. Bare end grain pulls water in the way a wick does, and whether a crew sees to that step or lets it slide tells you more about the life of the repair than the brand on the paint can.
The size of a rot repair really rests on four questions. You can work the first two out alone, inside a free hour, armed with nothing more than a screwdriver.
Does it hold weight? Trim, a water table, the bottom course of siding, none of that keeps the house standing, so a rotten length is a lost afternoon and little else. A sill plate, a rim joist, a post footing or a deck ledger is a different matter, since the house leans on it, so that work brings shoring, stock rated to carry, and a permit followed by an inspection. There is no city hall in Hazel Dell; because it sits outside any city, the permit and the inspections go through the Clark County permit center, and a long clear span may call for stamped engineering. The board itself barely moves the bill. What costs is taking a bearing piece out from under its load without a thing shifting.
How far does the soft wood reach? Walk a screwdriver down the board at short intervals, pressing as you go, until the point no longer bites, and then test a full foot past that spot. The decay has already run inside the grain further than the paint admits, and quitting where the visible rot quits is the number one cause of a repair that fails twice.
Is epoxy worth a look? Sometimes, and we will flag it. Where a profile is long gone, think of a sash, a turned column, or trim salvaged off an old farmhouse, a consolidant packed with filler can save the piece, so long as the rot is only a pocket and the member is still whole underneath. It carries no weight, though, and it will not spare you opening a wall. If someone wants to trowel epoxy into a sill plate gone soft, they are scheduling your repair twice.
And what stands above it? That is the one that settles whether any of this holds. The water began higher up, perhaps a kickout left off where a roofline ties into a wall, a gutter clogged with needles and moss that overflows in a hard rain, siding shoved down into a garden bed, or a ledger with no flashing capping its top edge. We chase that leak down and seal it before a single new board is set, written onto the same estimate, since lumber put in under a leak still running only gets bought a second time.
Truthfully, the number rides on how much rot is hiding in the wall, and that total is not known until the deck or the wall is laid open. A few things, though, are plain from the start. A tight, one-spot repair, think a cracked belly band or a couple of mushy deck boards, falls at the bottom of the range. The moment a joist, a sill or a post base is involved, the cost rises, because a bearing piece drags temporary support and a county inspection in behind it. What moves the total most is simply how long the water has been at the wood, so where the rain runs most of the year, the cheapest fix is the one you take on now instead of waiting out another winter.
What surprises most people is where the money truly goes. Lumber is the smallest entry on a rot invoice. The bulk is in labor and getting at the work: setting up staging or planning a ladder, stripping siding well past the rot to reach behind it, holding the load on posts while the bad piece is swapped, and then closing everything back so nobody can tell. That same ten-foot run of bad trim costs better than twice as much two stories up as it does at arm’s reach, and splitting a job across two far corners of the house beats the cost of one larger patch in one spot.
Laid out in sequence, labor comes first. Next is the sealing that locks the fix in for good, flashing and house wrap, then siding, then primer and a finish coat. The lumber sits surprisingly far down, and a permit with its inspection comes last, owed only when the work carries load. On top of that, every item a crew has to detach and rehang gets its own line, a downspout, a gutter, a porch light, a stretch of deck railing, an eave-mounted dish, so the share of the number that is wood stands clearly apart from the share that is access.
Already holding a written bid from another outfit? Pass it along with the photos. On most written estimates we will match the figure or beat it by 10%, and you get that in writing.
10%
Email over that estimate and a photo of the damage. We reply the same day to anything landing before 5pm.
This work sits almost entirely outdoors, well off from your living space, so it is one of the least disruptive remodels to have going. Here is the rough shape of it.
We walk the yard together, point out what is coming off, and agree where to put the dumpster, the staging and the stack of lumber, which on a shaded, tree-filled lot can take some sorting. Anything that could break close to the wall we set aside first, yours to move or ours.
Here is the noisy day. The siding and trim come down over the morning, and by mid-afternoon you are looking at open framing. Those exposed hours decide the question the estimate left open: whether the extra you okayed as a possibility turns out to be there.
Should the opening reveal more than the bid allowed for, we phone you the same afternoon, photos attached, and hold off on any further cutting. None of the possible-extent work begins until you tell us to carry on.
Replacement framing and sheathing are nailed up, then the house wrap and flashing go on before we leave for the day, so nothing is left standing open overnight in the rain. If weather rolls in ahead of us, we tarp and sheet the opening, tape every edge, and leave it buttoned up dry until the front moves through.
The siding returns to the wall, the trim after it, and then caulk and a first coat of primer. From the road it already reads as finished, which is usually about when someone next door comes by to ask for our number.
The topcoat is the final step. With that dry, we clear and sweep the site and go over the whole repair with you, ticking each item against the bid. The old rotted wood, our cutoffs and the dumpster are gone when we pull out of the driveway.
Grab a screwdriver, or the corner of a house key, and lean on the questionable wood. Sound material barely dents and pushes right back. Rotted material does the opposite: the point presses in easily, the surface feels soft or stringy, and it may shed damp little crumbs. Paint is a clue too, since it tends to blister and peel in isolated patches over wood that has started to turn. When almost no force sinks the tip, the fiber beneath is already spent. Take a couple of pictures, add a sentence on what you found, and fire it over to us. If it comes in ahead of 5pm, you will have our read the same day.
Sometimes the trouble really does stop at the board you can see, and if that is the case, you will hear it from us. The moment the softness carries on past that piece, though, covering it over is off the table. Concealed rot will not stop just because it is hidden; it carries on chewing the framing behind that fresh board, and a year or two later you are paying for a second repair that dwarfs the first. We would rather open it once and be done.
This comes up often, so we price for it up front instead of letting it blindside anyone mid-job. There are two parts to the bid: a committed cost for what we can be sure of while the wall is shut, and a marked-off allowance for whatever the opening reveals on top of that. The allowance stays frozen until you have reviewed our photos and cleared us to proceed.
Coverage depends entirely on the fine print of your own policy and on the cause of the leak, and only your insurance company can tell you where you stand. A contractor cannot make that call. What we bring is documentation: every area gets photographed and noted as we uncover it, so any claim stands on a clear, dated record instead of your word alone.
We own that step whenever a repair needs it. Putting load-bearing wood back, a sill, a rim joist, or the support under a deck, is permitted work, and since Hazel Dell lies beyond any city limits, no municipal building office enters into it. It all gets filed with Clark County, which sends the inspector as well, and a wide span may require engineered drawings carrying an engineer’s stamp. We are licensed in Washington, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC, so lodging the application and lining up each inspection is on us. Strictly cosmetic siding or trim, with no structure behind it, will usually need no permit.
Count on a day, maybe two, for anything confined to trim or a length of siding. Once structure enters the picture it takes longer, because each stage, shoring the load, passing inspection, then drying the wall back in, has to follow the one before, and paint refuses to cure in wet weather. Your estimate spells out the number of days. For the bulk of the job you can carry on as normal. The single day to keep your phone handy is the one the wall comes open, because any call on hidden damage will reach you then.
In almost every case we can. The common clapboard, shingle courses and casing shapes are either carried at the yard or cut fresh at a millwork shop, and where a profile has vanished from the catalogs for good, we glue up our own from stock and shape it until the face and reveal line up with the neighboring boards. The color end is the easy part. Hand us the leftover can or its formula code and it is quick work. Lacking both, we scan a flake chipped from the siding and match straight to it.
The easiest months are the dry ones, call it July through September, for the plain reason that nothing has to stay open as long. We are happy to work outside that window, though, and we do it all year. The trick is that we button each portion back against the rain the moment it is ready, so the house is never sitting wide open. Waiting for a dry spell almost always backfires. The water does not take a break while you delay, so what would have been a quick fix just keeps growing into something bigger and pricier.
The shop is at 505 SE 184th Avenue in east Vancouver, close enough to Hazel Dell that we can be at your place and back the same morning, with no river between us and the work. We cover the whole community, both the north and south halves, from the 1950s to 1970s ranch and post-war homes strung along the Highway 99 corridor to the shaded streets and aging decks tucked off it, down onto the lower lots toward Burnt Bridge and Cougar Creek, and out to the handful of original farmhouses left from the old orchard and dairy days. Since the area is unincorporated, every permit and inspection goes through the Clark County permit center. Licensed in Washington, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC.
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
We talked to 4 different contractors and only David, of Evergreen, took the time to climb up to our roof to check out the job. The others gave us bids based upon a photo. Evergreen was not the cheapest but the extent of the work they did was worth every penny.
Steve K.Roof and exterior work
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
Send photos and a short description. If it arrives before 5pm you get an answer the same day.
Already have a written estimate from someone else? Send that too. We match or beat most estimates by 10%.
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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Same day response on anything sent before 5pm.
