A Battle Ground bathroom usually fails long before anything on the surface gives it away. A shower that empties too slowly, or a toilet quietly leaking past a failed wax ring, keeps feeding water into the subfloor and the studs while the tile up top still looks fine. In the older homes near downtown and out on the acreage around Hockinson and Venersborg, the damage only shows itself once we lift the floor. Rebuilding rotted framing is the work this crew is known for, so a soaked joist is the part of the job we do best, not the part we hand off.
Licensed and insured. WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC
On anything sent before 5pm
We match or beat most written estimates
Remodels completed
Old finishes stripped out, wet walls sealed with a bonded membrane, new fixtures throughout.
The old tub and surround come out, waterproofing goes behind the wall and gets inspected, and the shower pan and glass finish the job last.
Out on acreage lots, a rotted stud or soft subfloor section comes out completely and gets rebuilt in solid lumber, never just patched over.
Tile goes down only after a bonded membrane seals the wet zone, never straight onto bare backer board.
A right-sized exhaust fan matters most on acreage lots, the vanity goes in with room for the door to swing, and the toilet and lights finish last.
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 never goes bad at the shiny face you look at every morning. It goes from behind, in the parts no one sees: a waterproof layer bonded tight against the wall, a shower base pitched to shed water rather than pond it, joints sealed so they stay sealed, and a fan with the muscle to drive wet air right out of the house. A bargain remodel ignores all four and still looks sharp the morning it wraps. We build the wet zones to current code and send each fan’s duct the whole way outdoors, out a sidewall or up through the roof, because in Battle Ground the damp sits under the fir canopy for most of the year, and a fan that empties all of it into your attic instead is simply a rot repair nobody has scheduled yet.
What stands behind a tiled shower comes down to one of three systems, and that choice, far more than the tile, decides how many years pass before water finds the wood. Our method is a bonded membrane. A sheet or a brushed-on liquid goes over the backer board and gets sealed into a single continuous skin, corners, seams and every pipe included, and the tile lands on top of that. A rigid foam setup does the same job a different way, by building the waterproofing right into the board. The third option, plain cement board with a swipe of mastic, is the one that starts leaking in the neighborhood of fifteen years, and we turn it down every time. Whatever a bargain bid trims off, that skin is the single thing keeping water out of the floor below.
Half the waterproofing lives in the shower floor itself. The base has to drop toward the drain at an even slope, and the no-threshold entry people want these days has to get that slope going from a point lower than the rest of the room. Where the house is already built, you earn that by trimming the floor joists down over that span or hanging them lower to begin with, a framing call made long before anyone picks up a trowel. That is the reason a step-free shower runs into money in one of the older farmhouses around town, and barely registers on the bill when the floor is going in fresh out in a new subdivision.
Tile, more than anything, is a decision about maintenance. Go with big porcelain slabs and you get hardly any grout lines, which means less to scrub and fewer joints waiting to fail, though the wall behind them has to be perfectly flat and the hanging costs more. Choose a pebble or mosaic floor and your feet get better grip when it is wet, but now you own all those extra seams. Marble and other stone read as luxury and soak up water just as readily, so they commit you to resealing on a schedule you actually have to honor. For the grout, epoxy belongs anywhere that gets wet and scrubbed, regular grout can go everywhere else, and the inside corners get a flexible sealant instead, because a corner flexes and grout in a corner simply splits.
With the fittings, spend on the valve and let your eye decide everything after. The mixing valve behind the wall, pressure-balanced or thermostatic, is the one piece you never want to chase again once it is buried, while the lever and spout hung on its face swap out on any ordinary weekday. Want the vanity floated off the floor to make a small room feel bigger? Fine, but that wall has to get solid blocking fixed in it first, before the drywall closes, so you decide that early. And set beside a shower, in air this consistently damp, a particleboard cabinet will swell and come apart within a few years.
The exhaust fan comes last and it is the cheapest line on the whole job, yet it is what keeps the room healthy. It has to be matched to the room’s size, its duct taken fully outside rather than dumped into the attic, switched on a timer or a humidity sensor, and insulated along its run so condensation does not drip back into the housing. In Battle Ground the air stays heavy for the long wet half of the year, and the fir and cedar shading the house hold that damp even longer, so a bathroom that never gets to dry out between showers will rot right on time. That little fan is what stands between the room lasting and the room failing.
This is an actual bathroom held at the stage people flip past with their camera. The finishes are all gone: the tile, the tub, the vanity and the old flooring, carried out to the last piece. What remains is a wall of old plank sheathing, batts of insulation loose in the stud bays, a drain pipe standing open where the toilet once bolted down, and the toilet itself set off to the side to wait, since it is the last thing to go back in.
Over on the right, the framing is new. That wall got a full reframe instead of a patch, the usual answer once shower water has been getting into the studs. The supply lines are capped off, and the shower valve already sits fixed at its final height, a step that cannot be put off, because the valve decides where every tile falls, and both it and the tile vanish the instant the backer board goes up.
Nothing else in the whole job sets as much of the final price, or the lifespan of the room, as this window does. With everything still in view, we settle the questions that matter: how much fall to give the pan, whether the entry goes flush to the floor, where to cut the niche, whether a soft joist wants a new one sistered to it. The moment the board goes on, those answers are locked for good. It is exactly why we have you stand in the room at this stage instead of sending along a photo after the walls are shut.
Around Battle Ground we run into this plenty, above all under showers that have seen daily use for twenty years or longer. What counts is what comes after we find it: we rebuild the structure ourselves, as the main thing this shop does, instead of phoning it out to another crew. Uncover a rotted joist, or subfloor gone soft underfoot, and we rebuild it then and there at a price already written on your estimate, so the schedule keeps rolling instead of freezing while a second contractor is hunted down.
The same handful of culprits turns up house after house. A patch of give in the floor right at the toilet turns out to be the work of a wax seal that gave out so quietly nobody caught it for years. The joist directly under the shower drain is stained through and spongy to the touch. A stretch of rim joist turns soft from a tub overflow weeping back into the wall cavity. And framing on an outside wall breaks down in any room whose fan never really moved air, which we see time and again in the shaded, tree-hemmed homes out on the acreage. We cut things open far enough to find every bit of it while the subfloor is exposed, because once it is sealed back up that same repair costs many times what it would now.
A few factors push the price up or down, in roughly this sequence. The biggest is whether the layout changes, because moving a toilet or a shower to a different wall means new drain runs underneath. After that comes the amount of tile going on the walls and floor, the tier of fixtures you choose, and whatever surprises the floor holds once it is opened. Leave everything in place and simply renew the finishes, and the job sits toward the bottom of the range. Tear it out, rework the layout, and tile clear to the ceiling, and it sits at the top. We break every estimate into line items, and any hidden damage is written as its own line you sign off on before the work starts. If you are already holding a written quote, send it over, because we match or beat most of them by 10%.
Where that money actually goes tends to surprise people, because a bathroom is a tiny room with a remarkable number of trades stacked into it. Labor takes the largest share by a wide margin, since setting tile is slow, careful work billed by the square foot, and a room of barely forty square feet must still shoulder carpentry, plumbing, wiring, the waterproof membrane, the tile, the paint and the trim, each trade waiting its turn. After labor come the tile and the membrane themselves, and the cost of those rides on how much surface you cover, not on the room’s footprint, which is why running tile to the ceiling costs well beyond stopping it at shoulder height. Fixtures and the vanity follow, and those are entirely yours to decide. Last of all is the plumbing rough-in, inexpensive while everything stays put and pricey the instant a toilet or shower moves to a new wall.
The one figure we will never trim is the waterproofing hidden behind the tile, and it is also among the cheapest things on the estimate. Leaving that membrane off might put a couple hundred dollars back in your pocket now, but it trades them for a repair in the thousands down the line, so we refuse to bid it that way. We would rather hand the job to someone else than build a shower destined to rot.
10%
Take a few pictures, especially of any spot where the floor feels soft or a stain shows on the ceiling below. Send them before 5pm and you get an answer the same day.
Being such a small space, a bathroom keeps the mess concentrated and the timeline short instead of letting it sprawl out for weeks. Below is the sequence the job moves through, with the points that sting most when you have no second bathroom to fall back on.
Tile, fixtures and the vanity are all ordered and sitting in the shop before a single thing comes out. Nothing holds a bathroom hostage longer, or more needlessly, than a half-finished room waiting on a tile box that never shipped. We also work out where the dust wall goes and the route the crew will use coming and going from the room.
Plan on one day, occasionally two. Out go the tub, the tile, the vanity and the worn flooring, until the room is down to open framing and subfloor and nothing the walls were covering is left out of sight.
With the walls open, we take our time over the framing, the subfloor and the worn plumbing. Should any of it turn out damaged, pictures reach you that same day and a number comes with them, well before anything gets sealed back in.
Plumbing and wiring get run to their new spots, blocking is fixed behind the drywall wherever a vanity or grab bar will mount, and then an inspection follows, by the City of Battle Ground in the city limits or by Clark County on the unincorporated lots. Nothing gets closed up before it passes.
First the backer board, then the waterproof membrane with every seam, corner and pipe locked down, then the shower pan, and finally the tile, rising up the walls and spreading across the floor. Setting tile is the unhurried stretch nobody can speed along, since thinset and grout cure to their own timetable rather than ours.
Finish work closes the job out: in go the vanity and toilet, up go the mirror and shower trim, the fan gets wired, and the painting and trim carpentry wrap it up. Then the two of us walk the room together, checking each item off against the estimate you okayed. The toilet and sink tend to come back into service a handful of days ahead of the shower.
Of everything in the room, the shower is what stays offline the full stretch, because it has to be demolished, sealed, tiled and then given time to cure before anyone uses it. The sink and toilet return to service far sooner. If this is your household’s only bathroom, say so up front, and we will stage the job so those two are up and running again at the earliest point we can.
Yes, that swap is one of the most common things we build. Plan on new drain work, the whole wet area given a proper waterproof layer, and usually new tile climbing the walls. Pulling the tub also opens up the floor it was sitting on, and in an older farmhouse or a downtown home that is often where we find subfloor gone soft from years of overflow water with no one the wiser.
When the floor flexes right at the foot of the toilet, the cause is nearly always a wax seal that quit some time ago, letting water work into the subfloor week after week. The repair itself is routine, and it costs far less handled now than once another damp winter has pushed the rot further. Send us a picture of the area and we will give you a read on how far it has likely traveled.
Any time the work means relocating plumbing, getting into the wiring, or rebuilding structural framing under the floor, the answer is yes. Within the city limits that permit runs through the City of Battle Ground Community Development Department, while out on the unincorporated acreage around town it is Clark County that issues it and inspects. We hold a Washington contractor registration, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC, so pulling the permit and booking the inspections is on us. Leave the fixtures where they already sit and skip any structural work, and in most cases no permit is required at all.
Usually it can be done, but what it costs turns completely on what lies under the floor. The base of a step-free shower sits lower than the floor around it, which in a finished house leaves two routes: trim the joists down over that bay, or raise the surrounding floor up to the shower’s level. Which route fits depends on how the house is framed, and plenty of the rural homes around here have a crawlspace we can get into and read it from below. Otherwise, we cut a small opening from above.
From the framing outward: backer board goes on, a bonded waterproof membrane gets sealed over it at every corner, seam and pipe penetration, and the thinset and tile ride on top of all that. The membrane is what does the real work of holding water back. On its own, backer board drinks water the same as any other board, no matter what a bargain bid promises during the walkthrough. Leave that membrane out and you have built the one shortcut this trade leans on more than any other.
In this climate it does more good than nearly any other part of the room. The damp lingers for the long wet half of the year, and the heavy tree cover keeps the house shaded and slow to dry out, so a fan that is too small, or one whose duct dead-ends in the attic, leaves the space soaked for hours after the shower shuts off. Moisture left sitting like that is what feeds rot in the studs and mold behind the cabinet. Getting the size right, carrying the duct all the way outside through a wall or the roof, and tying it to a countdown switch or a moisture sensor adds next to nothing to the bill while the framing is still exposed.
A straightforward gut and rebuild measures in weeks, not days, and it helps to know that much of that time is thinset and grout curing and the wait for an inspector, rather than anyone idling on site. Rearranging the layout or putting rotted framing back pushes the finish out further still. Every estimate carries a day count, and if yours is the only bathroom in the house, we plan the order of work to return the toilet and sink to use early in the run.
The shop is on SE 184th Ave in east Vancouver, and it is a clean shot north up SR-503 into Battle Ground without a bridge in the way, so we turn up fast. We take on baths across the whole area: the older homes near downtown and Main Street that still wear their original wood trim, the new subdivisions going in quickly around the edges of town, the acreage and horse properties tucked back in the firs toward Hockinson, Venersborg and Heisson, the homes out by Battle Ground Lake and Lewisville Park, and on through Brush Prairie, Meadow Glade and up to Yacolt.
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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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.
