Clackamas never grew up around one old downtown or one builder’s master plan, so a bathroom here can trace back to almost any decade depending on which pocket of houses sits behind which stretch of Highway 212. A shower pan that weeps at one seam, or a toilet still rocking on the wax ring it shipped with, can soak the framing under the tile for years before anyone notices a soft spot underfoot. Putting that kind of damage right is the specialty this crew is built around, so a soft joist found mid-remodel gets fixed by the same people who found it, not handed off to someone else.
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Every old surface comes out, every wet wall gets a true waterproof membrane, and every fixture that goes back in is new.
The new pan gets pitched to the drain and leveled before the glass or curtain ever goes up, with the old tub’s drain line fully relocated, not just capped.
Whatever a leak has reached, old framing or fairly new, comes out whole and goes back in solid lumber rather than a patch nailed over a soft spot.
No tile goes down in this room until a bonded waterproof layer has already covered the floor, the walls and the shower, corner to corner.
The fan gets matched to the room’s actual square footage, every fixture sets level, and the vanity still leaves full clearance for the door to swing.
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 in this part of the county rarely gives out at the tile you see every morning. It gives out behind it: a membrane bonded flat against the wall, a shower base pitched to actually reach the drain, corners and seams that keep their seal, and a fan strong enough to clear the room instead of just stirring the same wet air around in it. None of that shows up in a photo taken for a listing, and a rushed, bargain remodel can skip every one of the four and still pass a final walkthrough. We build every wet area here to current code and run each fan duct straight outside rather than into the attic, because Clackamas sees somewhere around 43 to 45 inches of rain most years, and a house sitting close to a parking lot or a busy stretch of road dries out slower than one tucked into a quiet, tree-covered yard. A fan that only empties into the attic in that kind of setting is simply a future rot repair we would rather not schedule with you.
Only three real systems ever end up behind a tiled shower, and which one is actually there matters more to the room’s future than the tile pattern chosen on top of it. What this crew installs is a bonded membrane, sheet goods or a liquid coating, carried over backer board and tied into one unbroken seal at every corner, seam and pipe before a single tile is set. A rigid waterproof panel reaches a similar result from the other direction, since the board itself is manufactured to resist water rather than coated afterward. The version we turn down every time is plain backer board finished with a smear of mastic at the joints, a combination that tends to start letting go somewhere around its fifteenth year in service. Cut that one hidden layer to shave a bid, and the thing actually removed is the only barrier standing between the shower and the floor joists underneath it.
Half of that waterproofing job lives in the floor of the shower, not the wall. A pan has to pitch evenly toward its drain, and the curbless, step-free entry most homeowners ask for now needs that pitch to begin below the level of the room around it. Because housing along this stretch of the county went up across so many different decades rather than in one subdivision push, the joist depth under an existing bathroom floor varies more from house to house here than it would in a neighborhood built all at once, so reaching that low point sometimes means notching the existing joists down through that span and sometimes means framing a short section lower from scratch. We will know which one your particular floor calls for after a look from below, where there is a crawlspace, or a small test opening cut from above.
Choosing the tile itself mostly comes down to how much upkeep you are willing to sign up for later, not which one photographs best in a showroom. Oversized porcelain panels leave very few grout lines to scrub, though the wall behind them has to sit close to dead flat and the labor to hang them runs higher. Drop to a smaller mosaic or pebble floor instead and footing improves once it is wet, in exchange for a web of grout seams that needs attention for as long as you own the house. Natural stone carries the higher price tag it looks like it should and drinks in water at close to the same rate, so putting marble in a shower means keeping up with a resealing routine rather than letting it slide. Whatever the mix, any surface a scrub brush and standing water meet regularly gets epoxy grout, ordinary cement grout covers the rest, and every inside corner gets a flexible sealant instead of grout, since a corner that shifts will crack anything rigid eventually.
On the fixtures themselves, the one place worth spending more is the part that disappears. A pressure-balanced or thermostatic mixing valve gets sealed into the wall the moment tile closes around it, so that is the piece worth buying well the first time rather than reopening finished work later, while the handle and showerhead bolted to its face swap out on any ordinary Saturday years down the line. A wall-hung vanity can open up a tighter floor plan, something plenty of these older bathrooms could use, but the studs behind it need solid blocking fastened in before the drywall closes, a call made at rough-in or not at all. Keep particleboard cabinetry away from a shower wall in a room this damp, since that material swells and comes apart well short of the time you would expect it to last.
Last on this list, and the least expensive line on the whole estimate, is the exhaust fan, and it carries more weight for the room’s future than anything above it on the page. Match it to the actual square footage, run its duct the full way to open air instead of letting it dead-end in the attic, wire it to a timer or a humidity sensor, and wrap the run so condensation cannot weep back down into the housing. This stretch of Clackamas County sees somewhere around 43 to 45 inches of rain most years, and a bathroom that never gets a real chance to dry out between showers rots on a predictable schedule no matter which decade built the framing around it. That one inexpensive fan is what decides which way it goes.
Here is one of our bathrooms with every finish already gone: the tub, the tile, the vanity and the tired flooring, all hauled out in one pass. What is left standing is the original wall sheathing on one side, loose insulation hanging out of the stud bays, an open drain fitting where a toilet base used to sit, and the toilet itself parked off in the corner, waiting its turn since it is always the last fixture reset.
Look at the wall on the right and you are looking at brand-new framing, not a patch job laid over the old. A stud bay earns a full rebuild like that once shower water has been quietly working into it, regardless of which decade originally framed the house around it. The supply stubs are capped, and the shower valve already sits fixed at the exact height it will keep, a detail locked in now because the tile grid follows wherever that valve lands, and neither one stays visible once the backer board closes over the wall.
Nothing else in this job shapes the final number, or the room’s lifespan, the way this one stretch does. While the framing is still showing, we work out how much the pan should pitch, whether the entry will sit level with the hallway, the exact spot for a recessed niche, and whether a weakened joist gets a second one bolted alongside it before any of it disappears for good. That is the real reason we ask you to stand in the room with us right now, instead of explaining it later next to a photograph.
Clackamas bathrooms fail on their own separate timelines rather than one shared neighborhood clock, since the houses along this stretch of the county were framed across so many different decades to begin with. What actually decides whether we find trouble is simpler than the house’s age: how many years a particular shower has run daily, and whether it sits close enough to a retail or industrial stretch of Highway 212 that thinner tree cover and extra runoff keep the ground around it wetter than a quiet block nearby. What sets this crew apart once something does turn up is what happens next. Rebuilding damaged framing is our own trade, never a scope we hand off to a second contractor, and a soft joist or a punky run of subfloor gets rebuilt at the number already on your estimate so the job keeps moving instead of stalling.
The same handful of problem spots shows up no matter which decade built the house. Some give in the floor right where the toilet sits almost always means a wax ring quit years back without anyone noticing. The joist directly below the shower drain turns dark and dents under a thumb. A run of rim joist goes punky wherever a tub has overflowed more than once and nobody mopped it dry in time. And wherever a bathroom sits along an exterior wall with a fan that never really pulled its weight, that framing softens first. We cut the floor open far enough to find every bit of it in one pass, because once new board covers it again, the same fix costs several times more.
A handful of factors set the number for a Clackamas bathroom, and relocation tops the list every time: send the toilet or shower to a different wall and you are paying for brand-new drain runs, not just new fixtures. After that comes how much wall and floor actually gets tiled, the tier of fixtures you settle on, and what condition the subfloor turns out to be in once it is open, which varies more here than in a neighborhood built all in one push, since houses along this corridor went up across so many different decades. Leave the layout exactly as it sits and simply refresh the surfaces, and the number lands near the bottom of what we quote. Rework the layout and carry tile to the ceiling, and it climbs toward the top. Every estimate we send breaks each line out on its own, and any damage the floor hides becomes its own approved item before we touch it. Already holding a number from someone else in writing? Show it to us and we will tell you honestly whether we can land under it.
Most homeowners guess wrong about where that money actually lands. It is not the fixtures. It is skilled labor, by a wide margin: even a room under forty square feet still has to host a plumber, an electrician, a framer, a tile setter and a finish carpenter, each one working their own turn rather than side by side in a space that tight. Tile and the membrane beneath it come next, priced to the square footage you actually cover rather than the room’s footprint, which is why carrying tile floor to ceiling costs well past stopping it at shoulder height. The vanity and fixtures after that are entirely a matter of your own taste. Last on the list, and usually the cheapest, sits the plumbing rough-in, inexpensive while nothing relocates and considerably pricier the moment a toilet or shower lands on a new wall.
One figure on that estimate never gets trimmed to win a bid, and it happens to be among the smallest line items on the whole page: the waterproof membrane sealed behind the tile. Drop it and you keep a couple hundred dollars today, set against a repair bill running into the thousands once that gap has had a wet season or two to reach the framing underneath. We do not quote a Clackamas bathroom any other way, even when that honesty costs us the job to someone willing to build it cheaper.
10%
Send a picture of the spot, especially if it has any give or a stain, and mention roughly how old that part of the house is. Get it to us ahead of 5, and we will have a real answer back to you before the day is done.
A bathroom is one of the smallest rooms in the house, so the days this job actually disrupts stay limited to this one space instead of bleeding into the rest of a Clackamas home for weeks. Here is how those days typically stack up, called out below wherever it matters most for a household down to a single working bathroom.
Tile, vanity and fixtures all arrive and get checked against the plan before anyone picks up a tool, because the slowest part of this whole trade is a torn-open room sitting idle on a backordered box. Where the plastic sheeting hangs and which hallway the crew tracks debris through both get decided on paper first, not worked out on the fly once dust is already in the air.
Figure one working day for most Clackamas bathrooms, two only if the room runs larger than average. The tub, the tile, the vanity and the old flooring all come out in one push, leaving the room down to open studs and bare subfloor so whatever has been sitting behind them for however many decades is finally visible at once.
Now that the wall is open, we inspect the framing, the subfloor and any plumbing that has been sitting behind it. Anything that turns out damaged gets its own photo and a written number the same afternoon, before another board gets cut.
Plumbing and wiring reach their new fixture locations, solid blocking goes into the studs ahead of the vanity and any grab bars, and only then does the rough-in get its inspection. Because Clackamas has no city hall or building department of its own, that inspection comes straight from Clackamas County’s own Building Codes Division on Beavercreek Road in Oregon City, not from a city office the way it does in every other Clackamas County community on our schedule. Nothing closes back up until that approval is logged.
The order stays fixed no matter how the schedule is running: backer board against open studs, a bonded membrane worked into one continuous seal at every corner and pipe, the shower pan set once that layer has fully cured, and tile last, climbing the walls and running across the floor. Nobody can compress the tile stage to fit a calendar. Thinset needs its own days to set before grout goes between the joints, and grout needs more time still before anyone should run water in the room.
Finish day closes the room out: the vanity and toilet go back in, the mirror and shower trim go up, the fan gets its final hookup and a test run, and a fresh coat of paint with trim carpentry rounds off the work. From there we walk every line of the signed estimate with you before calling it done. Because the shower tile still needs its own days to finish curing, most Clackamas households have a working sink and toilet running several days ahead of that.
Count on the shower being the last fixture back in service, not the first, since new waterproofing and tile both need real days to set before anyone can safely step inside. Your toilet and sink are a different matter entirely, and in nearly every Clackamas job we run, both are hooked up and usable again well before the shower tile has finished curing. Just flag it when we scope the work that yours is the only bathroom in the house, and the whole day-by-day plan gets built around closing that gap as fast as the job allows.
Yes, it is one of the more frequent requests we take on in this stretch of the county, regardless of what decade a particular house happens to date from. Converting it means relocating the drain to wherever the new shower floor sits, running a continuous waterproof membrane up the full wet wall, and setting tile only once that membrane has fully cured. Pulling the original tub is also the first real look we get at the floor underneath it, and on a property near enough to one of the busier stretches of Highway 212 that tree cover is thin, a slow leak there can go unnoticed longer than it would on a shadier residential block. Either way, the drain work and the waterproofing happen regardless of what the subfloor turns out to be.
That kind of flex almost always means a wax ring quietly failed at some point, with every flush since sending a trace of water down into the subfloor below. It is a routine fix once the toilet comes up, and far cheaper handled now than after it has had more time to spread. Mention roughly which decade your part of Clackamas was built in when you send us a photo of the spot, since housing along this stretch of the county covers such a wide range of eras that it changes what we actually expect to find once the floor opens.
A permit kicks in whenever the work relocates a drain line, opens up wiring, or rebuilds framing that water has already ruined beneath the floor. Because Clackamas has no city hall of its own, that paperwork never goes to a city office the way it would in every other community we build in nearby. Instead it runs straight to Clackamas County’s own Building Codes Division out of its Beavercreek Road office in Oregon City. Under our Oregon CCB #262707, pulling that permit and showing up for the inspection it requires is our job, not yours. A simple like-for-like fixture swap that touches nothing structural is the one case where none of this applies.
Here the answer turns on which decade that particular pocket of the county was framed in, more than on the house’s age in years alone, since no single subdivision plan covers this area. A step-free base has to sit lower than the floor around it, and in a home framed back in the 1960s or 70s, reaching that usually means cutting the existing joists down through that span or building the surrounding floor up to match. A house framed sometime after 2000 was often set up with that drop already planned into the subfloor, so the same feature costs noticeably less there. Tell us roughly when your particular section of the house was built, and we can usually say which category it falls into before anyone opens the floor.
The tile is cosmetic. What actually stops water is bonded underneath it, long before grout ever gets mixed: a sheet or liquid membrane carried across the backer board and tied into one unbroken skin at every corner, seam and pipe penetration. Leave that layer out and rely on backer board alone, and the wall takes on water eventually anyway, just on a slower timeline than if it were left completely bare. Skipping that membrane is the single shortcut we run into most once we open up an older bathroom in one of the scattered residential pockets along this stretch of the county.
Yes, more than almost anything else in the room. This part of the county sees somewhere around 43 to 45 inches of rain most years, and a house sitting close to a parking lot or a busy stretch of Highway 212, where there is less tree cover to begin with, dries out even slower than one tucked into a quiet residential block nearby. An undersized fan, or one that simply dumps air into the attic rather than carrying it outside, leaves the room holding onto its moisture for hours after anyone showers, which is exactly how rot gets started in framing and mildew takes hold behind a vanity. Matching the fan’s capacity to the room, carrying its duct the full distance to open air, and switching it onto a humidity sensor rather than a bare toggle is a minor add while the walls are already open, and it is the one upgrade on this list most worth doing.
Budget two to four weeks for a complete gut and rebuild, and remember that stretch is mostly waiting, not working: thinset and grout each cure on their own schedule, and the rough-in sits in the queue for Clackamas County’s Building Codes Division before the next step can start, the same office every job in this unincorporated area answers to. What actually swings that number is less the calendar date the house was built and more what the floor reveals once it opens, since a 1960s pocket near the retail corridor and a house finished within the last few years can turn up completely different framing a few blocks apart. Every quote we send spells out a real day count for your specific scope, and when a household has only the one bathroom, the toilet and sink are the first two fixtures we plan to get running again, well before the shower itself is ready.
Clackamas is one of the longer hauls on our schedule from the shop in east Vancouver, not because of any river crossing but because of how far southeast the drive runs once we are across the Columbia on I-205 and well past the Portland city line, out toward the stretch of interstate where the Sunnyside interchange and Clackamas Town Center come into view. Our Oregon contractor license, CCB #262707, covers every job in the area.
Because Clackamas has never been its own incorporated city, we remodel bathrooms here across a real patchwork rather than one defined downtown or a single subdivision era: the scattered older homes tucked behind the retail stretch near the mall, the pockets of newer houses filling in along the Highway 212 industrial corridor, the streets closer to Camp Withycombe and the Kaiser Sunnyside Medical Center campus off SE Sunnyside Road, and the quieter lots backing up to Mount Talbert Nature Park, the extinct volcanic cinder cone Metro and the local parks district opened as a trail area in 2007.
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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