Milwaukie started out as a shipping town, not a resort community, platted in 1849 by Lot Whitcomb to compete with Oregon City for freight moving up and down the river. That history still shapes the ground a deck sits on here. The city grew up where Kellogg Creek empties into the Willamette, and the low, close air along that confluence stays damp well after a storm has cleared out over Portland. Add in the mature shade trees covering older streets through Ardenwald and Historic Milwaukie, and a deck here can stay wet for days after everything around it has dried out. We frame, flash and brace decks and patio covers to answer that river-bottom dampness directly, not just the rain gauge.
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We match or beat most written estimates
Remodels completed
The full build, footings, frame, decking, railing and a stair run, flashed against river-bottom damp, finished in cedar or composite.
A frame that still has good wood in it gets a new surface screwed down on top, no need to start over. One that the creek-bottom damp has finally eaten through comes out completely, footings and all, and gets rebuilt from scratch.
A roof tied into the house itself, so the patio keeps earning its spot in the yard once the November rain settles in for good.
The posts, the beams, the footings under them, and the ledger bolted into the house wall.
Older railings often carry patches from several owners, so we strip the whole run, inspect every post and rebuild its tie to the frame where needed. The new rail is built so its height and baluster gaps satisfy current code, a standard that older work may not meet. Nothing about the deck itself has to be rebuilt.
The frame is the part you never see again once the boards go down. This is the same deck at both stages.
Drag the handle. Left, the deck framed: joists on the beam, nothing to walk on yet. Right, the same deck finished, with the timber cover over it and the steps down to the yard.
Before After Call us out to look at a failing deck in Milwaukie and the actual damage usually starts at the ledger, the single board lagged into the house that carries the whole structure’s weight back into the wall framing. It sits behind the decking where nobody ever looks, so a flashing detail that was never quite right lets water track in behind the board without anyone noticing for a long time. This close to where Kellogg Creek runs into the Willamette, that wall rarely gets a real stretch of dry air to recover in, and the older homes through Ardenwald and Historic Milwaukie carry decades more exposure to that same damp than anything built recently. Little by little the deck pulls away from the house while the framing tucked behind the siding goes soft and dark. That is why the ledger is the first thing we open on any rebuild, and why a new deck gets that connection flashed and bolted to code without shortcuts, since it fails in the one place you would never think to check.
Four real decisions shape a deck build, and the surface you walk on is honestly just one of the four.
Start underground, since nothing above it matters much if this part is wrong. Footing holes get dug to whatever depth the approved permit specifies, filled with real poured concrete, and capped with a post base that holds the post itself up off the pad instead of sitting in whatever water collects there. On lots that sit low near Kellogg Creek, that gap matters more than it would on higher ground across town, because a post planted straight into wet soil is one of the most common reasons an otherwise good-looking deck gets torn out years before it should.
Above the footings sits the actual structure, and no matter what you eventually walk on, that structure is built from wood. We use pressure-treated lumber throughout, hang every joist in a proper hanger instead of nailing through its end, and call for stainless or hot-dipped galvanized hardware on every screw and bracket in the frame. Plain zinc hardware does not survive long against the copper in today’s treated lumber, so a rusted-out hanger is doing nothing for the deck above it no matter how new that deck looks. Taping the top edge of every joist is a small added cost that keeps rain off the one surface of the frame that, tucked under Milwaukie’s older shade trees, almost never gets a real stretch of sun to dry in.
Only now does the surface underfoot enter the conversation, even though it is usually the first question anyone asks. Pressure-treated fir is the cheapest option and the most restless, swelling and shrinking through our wet months until it has had a full season to dry before any finish will hold, and after that it needs regular washing and resealing to stay decent. Cedar holds flatter and feels nicer underfoot for more money, though the boards sold today carry more sapwood than they used to, so its upkeep catches up with fir’s faster than people expect. Capped composite is the expensive choice up front and nearly maintenance free afterward, no annual sealing, no graying, no splinters, though it runs warmer than wood on a lot that gets full afternoon sun. None of that is really a question of price per board. It is a question of whether you will actually keep up a wash and reseal routine for years, and most homeowners already know the honest answer about themselves.
Railing decisions mostly come down to what you want left visible past the rail. A plain wood rail is the cheapest option and demands the same upkeep as a wood floor. Black powder-coated aluminum is the common middle choice, thin posts, no maintenance, and it all but disappears against a yard full of mature trees. Cable and glass leave a view completely open and cost the most of the three, with their own separate rules on post spacing and infill that a frame built for ordinary wood balusters might not meet. Whichever one gets chosen, the code numbers stay fixed no matter what, since rail height and the maximum baluster gap are set by rule, not preference.
Two more line items are far cheaper to decide now than to add on afterward. A stair run costs more than its size implies, since each tread is a stand-alone piece of framing, and a gentle, wide flight always costs more than a tight, steep one, even though it is the difference between stairs that actually get used and stairs that get avoided. The second is anything electrical, a low-voltage wire tucked beneath the rail, a weatherproof outlet, a fan wired into a cover overhead, which costs almost nothing to run while the joists sit exposed and becomes real work once the decking is already fastened down.
This photograph comes from a deck we actually built, and it happens to show both halves of this page at once, a deck raised above the yard and a roofed section of it that keeps working once the weather turns wet.
Look along the outer edge and you will catch a lighter band of decking that frames the whole platform and wraps both of the wide, shallow steps down to the dirt below. Builders call that a picture frame border, and it runs more than a plain square-cut edge would, because every field board has to be measured precisely to die into it and the rim joists underneath have to be doubled to carry the extra load. It is also the detail that keeps a deck from reading as a simple stack of boards. The wide, low steps do similar work, tying the deck down into the yard instead of leaving it to sit above like a stage.
The four-post structure on top is a wood gazebo fitted with dark mesh curtains, and its full weight bears straight down onto the deck itself rather than onto any footings of its own. That means the joists below had to be sized for that extra load before the first surface board ever went down. That is about as plain a demonstration as you will find that a cover is structural work, decided down in the framing, not something tacked on once the roofline is the only thing anyone is looking at.
There is no wrong answer between the two, only the one that matches how you want to spend your weekends. Cedar and pressure-treated wood ask less of your wallet up front and can be refinished for decades, but around here that only holds true for an owner who actually gets out the hose and the sealer on schedule. Composite flips that trade: a bigger number on the first invoice buys you out of the moss and the gray that a wet, shaded Milwaukie winter will otherwise work into bare wood. What decides the real lifespan either way sits below both options and never changes: the frame underneath is wood regardless of what sits on top of it, and how carefully that frame was built matters more than which surface you chose.
Milwaukie’s wettest months, November and December, land right in the stretch you would otherwise want to be outside, and the dry spell does not really return until July or August. A solid roof over the patio, flashed properly where it meets the house and standing on posts set on real footings, hands that space back to you as room you will actually use through the gray months. Because it ties directly into the house frame it counts as structural work, not a freestanding accessory, so it almost always needs a permit filed through the state’s BuildingPermits.Oregon.gov portal, administered by the City of Milwaukie Building Division. One crew draws the plan, files it and builds the whole thing.
Three things set most of the price, the square footage, how high the deck finishes above grade, and the surface you choose. The least expensive path re-decks a frame that is already sound and sits close to the ground. Fresh footings, tall posts, a full stair run, or tearing out a frame that finally gave out all push the number higher. Composite adds to the material cost while removing the yearly upkeep entirely. If you already have a number from another contractor, bring it along. We match or beat most written estimates by 10 percent, in writing.
The boards themselves are rarely where the money actually goes, even though they are the first thing most people ask to have priced. Labor and framing take the largest share, cutting and hanging joists, setting and bracing posts and beams, and building a stair run, which packs more hours into a square foot than any other part of the job. Footings and the digging for them come next, and that line grows quickly as the deck climbs higher, since a taller post needs a wider footing and real bracing to hold against the weight above it. After that comes the decking and its fasteners, then the railing, a line item people routinely underprice because it sells by the running foot and a deck has no shortage of those. Finish work closes it out, skirting, a light or two, a gate, the small trim that tucks the frame out of view.
That is how two decks measuring exactly the same on paper can land on very different invoices, one built tall with a full stair run down toward Kellogg Creek, the other sitting flat against a patio slab well back from any slope. When the number on the estimate has to hold firm, the height and the footprint are almost always the first place to look for real savings, not the decking underfoot.
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Building a deck barely touches the inside of the house at all, which is part of what makes it such an easy project to have going on in the background. Below is roughly how the stages play out, one after another.
We nail down the footprint first, the finished height, where the stairs land, and the railing style, before any drawing goes anywhere. From there the plans are filed through the state’s BuildingPermits.Oregon.gov portal for review by the City of Milwaukie Building Division. A deck fastened to the house, or any cover with a real roof, has to clear that review, and it is the one stretch of the schedule that depends on somebody else’s timeline rather than ours.
String lines go up to mark the footprint, then the footing holes get bored down to the depth the approved permit calls for, concrete goes in, and the post bases set while it is still workable. A run of wet weather can push this stage back a day or two, since real concrete is particular about curing properly once ground water starts working its way into an open hole, which happens faster on lots near Kellogg Creek than it does across town.
Framing happens in full view of the city, on purpose. The ledger goes in first, lagged and flashed against the house wall, and from there the posts rise, get plumbed, and get braced before any load sits on them. Every joist seats into a hanger with a cap of tape run over its top edge. Nothing gets closed in until the inspector has actually walked the open frame, which is the reason this whole stage happens in a fixed order rather than however the crew finds it easiest.
Board by board, the surface closes in over the open frame, and once the trim border is run around the perimeter the stair opening finally gets cut to size and set. It’s usually around this point that a client stops calling it ‘the job site’ and starts calling it ‘the deck.’
The rail goes up last in the structural sense, posts, cap and infill, but it is far from the last thing anyone notices. After that come the pieces that finish the look rather than the strength, skirting around the base, a gate if the yard calls for one, a run of low lighting along the steps. Skip that stage and a structurally sound deck will still look like it is waiting for somebody to come back and finish it.
Cleanup is not an afterthought tacked onto the end. It is its own stop on the schedule. The dumpster, every offcut, and whatever soil came out of the footing holes all leave on the same truck the crew does. What’s left is a walkthrough, checking the finished deck line by line against the original estimate, and for a wood surface, a specific answer on how many weeks to wait before the first coat of sealer makes sense.
Sometimes, and when it holds up it saves you a real amount of money. We do not guess from the surface. We get underneath and check the ledger bolted to the house, work down the posts and beams, and finish at the footings, looking for wood that has gone soft or hardware that has started to let go. Decks behind the older homes in Ardenwald and Historic Milwaukie have often sat through close to a century of river-bottom damp, so the ledger and the lowest joists are usually where trouble shows first. Once we have actually been under there, you get a straight call: keep the frame as is, replace the sections that failed, or start over at the footings.
In almost every case, yes. Bolting a deck to the house, building it higher than a single low step above the yard, or putting a real roof over a patio all count as structural work, and the state’s BuildingPermits.Oregon.gov portal is where that review happens, with the City of Milwaukie Building Division handling the plan check and inspections themselves. We hold Oregon CCB #262707, and we are the ones who draw the plans, submit them through that state portal, and schedule both the framing inspection and the final sign-off. The one project that usually skips all of this is a low platform resting flat on the ground with nothing fastened to the house.
Plan on somewhere between a few days and two full weeks on site, mostly decided by the size of the deck, how many footings it needs, and what the weather is doing that particular week. That schedule gets written into your estimate from the start, not left vague. A roofed cover actually works in your favor here: once the roof itself is framed, the crew can keep working underneath it through a stretch of Milwaukie’s wetter weeks that would otherwise stall an open footing pour.
It is worth having someone look at rather than living with, especially on an older deck. That kind of give almost always traces back to framing that was undersized for its span to begin with, though we also rule out a failing ledger connection or a post base that has settled unevenly, which turns up more often on the older lots down near Kellogg Creek. If you can safely get a look underneath, send photos of the joists and the hangers and we will tell you honestly what we see before anyone drives out.
That comes down to the frame, not the boards on top of it. Build the structure in treated lumber, flash the ledger correctly against the house, cap every joist with tape, and hang everything on hardware that will not corrode, and you have built something that will carry two or three different decking surfaces over the years instead of needing to be torn out itself. With roughly 43 inches of rain a year here, heaviest in November and December and lightest in July and August, a wood surface kept washed and resealed on a real schedule holds up fine. Left alone through one of those wet winters, it goes to moss, then gray, then soft. Composite outlasts either, but it still rides on that same frame, which is why the framing is where this conversation always ends up.
Often, yes. If there is enough headroom and the existing slab still sheds water away from the house, we can frame a low deck on sleepers directly over that concrete and skip the digging and footings altogether. What changes the plan is a slab that has heaved, cracked badly, or now pitches back toward the house, and that is worth checking closely on the older lots near the water where the ground already holds more moisture than it does farther from it. We fix any drainage issue first, since sealing it under a brand-new deck just hides a problem that keeps getting worse against your foundation.
Together is almost always the better call, and not just for the savings, though that is real too. A cover needs something to carry its weight, either the deck’s own framing or a separate run of posts and footings, and that load has to be part of the plan before the first board goes down. Add a cover after the fact and reaching the frame again usually means pulling up decking you already paid to finish. Settling both pieces in one job is simply the cheaper path.
Moss is just what happens to a flat surface sitting under mature trees for months at a stretch, and Milwaukie’s older, tree-lined streets have no shortage of that kind of shade. It takes hold wherever a deck sits out of direct sun, traps water against the boards, and keeps the wood underneath damp for weeks on end. A real gap between boards so water can drain, joist tape underneath, and a good scrub once the wettest months ease off handle most of it. But a deck that never catches real sun at all is less a case for more frequent resealing and more a case for starting with composite instead.
Our shop sits on SE 184th Avenue in east Vancouver, so reaching Milwaukie means crossing the Columbia on I-205 and continuing south through Portland on I-5 or McLoughlin Boulevard, OR 99E, more road time than our closer jobs but a drive our crews make often. Once we’re on site we build across Milwaukie, the old downtown core of Historic Milwaukie along SE Main Street, the closer-in streets of Ardenwald and Hector Campbell, the riverside lots of Island Station, and the Lake Road, Lewelling and Linwood areas, plus the rest of Clackamas County nearby.
Three of the 50 reviews on our Google profile, in the homeowners' own words.
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
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
We had a small but very unique project and this team handled it with a great attitude. They were responsive, on time, and the finished work looks like it was always meant to be there.
Paige T.Small custom project
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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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