Portland filled in a century ago with small, boxed-off rooms, bungalows and four-squares drawn up when a parlor was a parlor and the kitchen hid at the back. Owners here come to us wanting one of those partitions gone and a wide slider or a run of folding glass in its place, so a dim back room finally meets the yard. Here is the part they rarely see coming: opening twelve feet of wall is not a glass order; it is a chunk of the house’s structure you pull out and stand back up. The header that bridges it, the posts that walk the weight down, and the flashing that keeps a wall-sized hole dry all have to be right. That is the half we own. Setting the glass is the simple part.
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In a century-old bungalow we open the wall, tie a header and jacks into the original structure, and set the door level. A sill pan below and lapped flashing above keep water out of an old wall cavity. New trim and siding match the house outside, while inside the plaster or drywall is patched and the opening cased and painted.
Pulling the wall that carries weight, setting in a beam cut to the span, and walking that load down through posts and footings onto firm ground.
Opening a tight window out to a full doorway, breaking a new hole into a blank wall, or sliding an existing opening to a spot that works better.
Bringing a sagged header back to level, dropping in a span finally sized for the real weight, and ripping out the quick fixes an earlier crew hid in the wall.
Outside we put the siding and trim back; inside it is drywall, new casing, flooring and fresh paint. One crew opens the wall and that same crew finishes it, so you never chase down a second contractor.
The wall came out, the beam went in, and two rooms became one. Same footprint on both sides of the line.
Drag the handle. Left, the wall between the kitchen and the next room opened up: studs exposed, the ladder standing in the opening, the floor covered. Right, the same footprint finished: a long island under pendants, and the two rooms reading as one.
Before After Picture a big door as a glass purchase and you have it backward. Those twelve feet of wall are load-bearing, and right now they are the reason the roof is not sitting in your lap. Take the wall out and that weight needs a fresh road down: across a beam sized for the span, onto a post at each jamb, and into a footing that reaches dirt firm enough to hold it. Miss on the beam, a post or a footing and the door becomes the tattletale, with panels that drag, a frame drifting out of square, and fine cracks climbing from the drywall corners. In these century-old homes the tired old crawlspace footings earn an extra look. Buying the glass is the light work. Giving that load a home is the real job, and it is ours, City of Portland permit and stamped engineering included.
This is the part we puzzle out together. The door takes the biggest share of the money, yet the thing you live with for decades is the opening, not the unit you paid for.
Start with the way you want the wall to move. A multi-slide rides a track and pushes its panels off to the side, banking them against the next stretch of wall or hiding them in a pocket if the room allows, and it gives the tightest seal of the three, though one leaf stays fixed unless you pay for that pocket. A folding door, the bifold or accordion, is hinged so the whole run gathers to one end and clears the opening completely, which asks a great deal more of the header, the track and the rollers, and prices accordingly. Wide French units and lift-and-slides fall between. In most old Portland rooms the wall itself decides it, because a chimney, a stair, or a built-in has already claimed the blank run the panels need to park against.
Material is the next call, and across twelve feet the frame is a real share of what you look at every day. Vinyl is the least expensive and the bulkiest, so heavy sightlines are the trade for the low number. Fiberglass costs a step more, holds slim lines, and barely moves as a damp winter morning warms toward afternoon, which counts for plenty stretched over a wide run. Aluminum-clad wood is where most of these installs settle, warm wood turned to the room and a weatherproof face turned to the rain. At the top sits thermally broken aluminum, the slimmest frames and the broadest panes of glass, for the steepest figure on the page.
Give the glass and the sill the same thought as the frame. Low-E coatings and an argon fill are simply standard now, and they earn the most on a west wall taking the long summer light. At floor level you pick between a flush sill, which lets the room run out level onto the deck and looks wonderful, and a raised one, which reads heavier but keeps the water out with far less fuss. Flush is the trickier one to keep watertight, so we set it only on a sound sill pan with a drainage plane behind. Sheltered under a patio cover, flush is an easy yes. If it is left open to a long wet Portland winter, we will make the case for the raised sill and show you why.
The structure is the one place with nothing to choose, only arithmetic. The span of the opening and the roof, floor and wall stacked over it decide whether the header is plain lumber, an engineered beam or a steel section, and how heavy a post each end must carry. Those posts cannot simply rest on the subfloor and hope; the weight has to reach the ground, by a beam set underneath, a post dropped through the crawlspace, or a fresh footing poured for the job. In a hundred-year-old house that often means working around an aging post-and-pier foundation. When a wide-door bid lands well below the others, this is the line that quietly fell off it.
Finally the finish, the part that separates a door that looks original to the house from one that looks tacked on. Outside, siding and trim to disappear into what is there; inside, drywall, casing, flooring and paint around the new opening. Weaving new siding into clapboards gone gray across a century, or matching a fir floor laid before the war, is patient work in its own right, and it tells most on a period home with trim worth saving. Carry the whole run with one crew and the opening looks as if it was penciled into the plans on day one.
This is a job caught mid-stride, at the one step the rest of it leans on. The slider is already set in the opening, the old siding trimmed back to frame it, and a worker reaching overhead is fixing the unit home through the white fin that wraps its edge.
The black membrane climbing the jamb is the flashing, and it only works in one order, bottom to top. The pan goes down in the sill first and folds out across the wall below, so anything that reaches it is carried over the top and away. The jamb strips land on the ends of that pan. The head goes over the tops of the jambs. The weather barrier drops over the head to finish. Each piece sheds onto the one beneath, the way a roof keeps itself dry with shingles. Put a single layer on out of turn and water slips in behind the casing and feeds the framing for years with nothing to show on the wall.
That is why the picture here is a bare opening and not a tidy finished wall. The minute the casing and siding close over it, every bit of this is hidden and you are simply trusting the hands that did it. The rot repair we are known for often traces back to a detail just like this, rushed ahead of the wet months while a heavy tree canopy held the damp against a shaded wall. Better to watch the layers go up now than to take our word for it once they are gone.
Turn a wall into a door and, as far as the rain is concerned, you have opened one long joint the full width of the wall, in a town that sees close to forty inches a year across a long wet season, with a mature tree canopy pressing damp and moss on a shaded wall long after the sky clears. A pan under the sill, head flashing above it, and a weather barrier lapped in the right order are the plain, humble things that keep all that water out of the framing around your handsome new door. We lay the weatherproofing on every opening as carefully as if the leak call would come straight back to us, because building it that way is how the call never comes.
Indoors the structure follows the same rules; a load is a load. The change we are asked for most is to knock out the wall that shuts a tight kitchen away from the living room, whether that is a 1910s four-square in one of the close-in neighborhoods with lath and plaster over the studs, or a later build where the owner just wants an island and a clear sightline. We settle one question before anything else: is the wall carrying weight? We open it just far enough to be sure, tell you plainly what is there, and when it does bear a load the figure we hand you already folds in the engineered beam, the posts under it and the City of Portland permit, with no low teaser that balloons the day the plaster comes down.
The quote for one of these is lopsided in a way most remodels are not, because a single line, the door, dwarfs everything under it. Where that line lands is almost entirely your call: brand, frame material and glass package swing it across a huge range, which is why two honest bids on the identical opening can arrive thousands apart before a saw ever moves. We break the estimate into the unit, the structure and the finish as separate lines, so none of it hides inside one lump sum. If another written quote is already in your hand, pass it along, since we match or beat most estimates by 10%.
Under that headline number sits the real construction cost, and it answers to three plain questions: how wide you are opening the wall, whether that wall is holding weight, and how much siding outside and finish inside it takes to close the hole back up. The structure is the beam, the posts beneath it, and any work needed under the floor to deliver their load to solid ground. Then there is the hands-on labor of cutting a clean opening and hanging a heavy unit dead plumb, square and tight to the weather, the finish on both faces, and finally the engineering fee and the City of Portland permit, small sums that are not optional.
Two things you will not find in any showroom move that bottom line harder than the rest. One is whether the wall takes a load, which for an exterior wall on an old Portland house is close to a certainty. The other is what the posts at the ends have to stand on, since one perched over a hollow crawlspace sends us down below to build support or pour a fresh footing before the opening is safe to leave. On a tired post-and-pier foundation that below-floor work turns up more often, and it is precisely the item a too-cheap bid quietly leaves off the page.
10%
Snap a couple of shots of the wall, inside and out if you can, and fire them over. Anything in our inbox before 5pm gets a reply the same day.
The piece everyone worries about, the home laid open to the sky, is really the briefest part of the whole thing. That wall is bare for a day, maybe two, and we pin that short window to the hour off the forecast. These are the steps in order.
A technician comes out, takes real numbers off the wall, and sorts out two things: where the weight above the opening lands, and what stands under the floor at either end to receive it. Spans past a certain width get handed to a structural engineer, who sizes the beam and its posts and signs and stamps the plans. That stamped set is what the City of Portland hangs the permit on.
First the paperwork: we file with the City of Portland Bureau of Development Services and get the unit on order within the same few days. This long, quiet stretch disturbs nothing in the house, since no board has yet been cut, so really it only asks you for patience. A door this wide is made for the exact opening it will fill, and as often as not it is the factory’s build queue, not our schedule, that settles when we break ground.
Day one on the job is preparation and nothing else. We lay protection over the floors and whatever stays in the room, then stand a run of temporary walls to shoulder the roof while the old wall is still in place. Not one structural board comes down until the door has arrived and those braces are proven to be carrying the weight overhead.
Once the braces are carrying the load, the wall comes down, a sized beam rises onto fresh posts, and we have the gap sealed against the weather by the time the crew heads home. This is the one stretch the house truly opens above, so we watch the Portland forecast and wait for a dry run before cutting.
In goes the door, shimmed true and level, then screwed off tight. After that the flashing, laid in the single sequence that keeps water out: a sill pan first, membrane up each jamb, head flashing over the top, and the weather barrier dropped across the head to close it out. None of it gets buried under casing or siding until the inspector has signed off on what sits behind.
Outside gets sealed first, the siding and trim picked to disappear into the boards already on the house, so the rain is held off the new opening straight away. Then the inside work, new drywall, fresh casing, flooring and paint. We walk you through the finished room, and once the structure has settled over a few weeks, we come back out to tweak the door so it swings freely and the latch seats true.
The two work differently, so it comes down to what you want from the opening. A slider is the simpler piece of hardware, seals up the tightest, and always leaves one panel standing in place. A folding door gathers its leaves to one end and clears the whole opening, so nothing breaks the view, but it costs more and puts more strain on the header, the track and the rollers that carry it. Bring us the real opening and a budget and we will lay both out honestly. Our framing work costs about the same either way, with the bifold unit itself carrying the extra, so there is nothing we are pushing.
Yes. Any time a bearing wall comes out, or a wide new opening is cut into one, the work is structural, and structural work means a permit and inspections. In Portland the file goes to the City of Portland’s Bureau of Development Services, with stamped engineering required once the span gets wide. We work under Oregon CCB #262707, and we file the permit and line up the engineer ourselves, so neither lands on you.
Barely a moment. The rule is firm: nothing gets cut until the header material and the door itself are sitting on site, and the opening is dried in and weathertight by the time we pack up that same evening. The trim and the rest of the finish all come later, with the house already shut tight against the weather, which matters through our long damp winters.
We do, fairly often. In most cases the door is sound and the problem is the hole around it, either a header that was undersized from the start or flashing nobody bothered to lap in correctly. Our fix is to take the surround back apart, correct the structure carrying the load, flash the whole thing over in proper sequence, and hang the unit again so it runs and latches the way it should have from the first day.
That is a question for the framing, not the showroom. Openings up to twelve feet are routine for us, and wider is possible with engineering, assessed per job. As the span grows, so must the piece carrying it, climbing from ordinary lumber to an engineered beam and on to steel, each step calling for heavier posts and a firmer route to the ground at both ends. We will not cut to any width until the load has been run on paper, and we never leave that math to whoever is selling the door.
Only when the flashing is done wrong, and flashing is a craft of its own, separate from hanging the door. The weatherproofing is stacked from the bottom up, each layer lapped over the one beneath so rain is always shed outward: sill pan, then jambs, then head, then the weather barrier across the top. Nearly every leaking wide door we are called to turns out to be a sound unit in an opening flashed out of sequence. With our walls staying damp under the trees for months, that sequence is no place to guess.
No. Temporary walls shoulder the roof before a single board is cut, so the opening itself is bare for one day rather than a stretch of them, and it is sealed back up before the crew leaves that night. All we ask is that you clear the room and put up with one loud day of sawing and lifting the beam. The rest of the house stays perfectly livable throughout.
Most times, yes, and a floor that carries out dead level to the deck, with no lip to step over, is a clean look worth having. The sill decides it. A low, flush threshold is the single spot on the opening that fights water the hardest, so we build one only above a proper drainage pan that sends anything getting past it straight back out. With a cover overhead, we say yes without a second thought. If it is open to the sky through our rainy months, we will lay the compromise out plainly and let you make the call.
Our shop sits at 505 SE 184th Ave on the east side of Vancouver, and Portland is a short drive off, a quick hop across the Columbia on the I-205 bridge. We take framing and wide-door work right across the city: the close-in bungalow and four-square streets around Hawthorne, Belmont and Woodstock, the old homes near Mount Tabor, Montavilla and Laurelhurst, Irvington and Alberta on the northeast side, Sellwood and Westmoreland to the south, and St. Johns beyond. Working under Oregon CCB #262707, we are just as at home east to Gresham and Happy Valley, or across to Milwaukie, Lake Oswego and Oregon City, permit and all.
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
Wow. Just Wow. Had the Evergreen crew replace existing fencing, put in a 33.5ft x 18.5ft multi-tiered deck, and assemble a 12ft x 16ft gazebo. Couldn't be happier with the results.
Anthony L.Deck, fence and gazebo
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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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