Felida bathrooms hide their worst damage well, and the story changes house to house more than it does in most neighborhoods, because a 1970s ranch can sit two doors from a custom farmhouse built in 2018, each with completely different plumbing and framing behind the tile. A shower pan that seeps at one seam, or a toilet rocking on a wax ring nobody has replaced since the house was framed, can feed water into the subfloor for years before a single tile shifts. Rot repair is this crew’s specialty, so when we open a wall on one of these quiet, tree-lined streets and find a soft joist, the fix happens on the spot instead of waiting on a second contractor.
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Demo clears every old surface, the shower walls get a continuous waterproof membrane, and new fixtures finish the room.
The tub comes out and a sloped, waterproofed pan goes in first, with the glass set last whether it’s a 1970s ranch bath or a newer estate build.
A hidden leak can hollow out framing and subfloor fast, and we rebuild it in solid wood whether the home is a 1970s original or a newer custom build.
Each wet floor and wall gets a fully bonded waterproofing layer first, so tile is never the only thing standing between water and the framing.
Felida’s wet season calls for a properly rated exhaust fan, along with a vanity and toilet set level and lighting wired to code.
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 on one of Felida’s large lots fails in exactly the same hidden way whether the house is a 1978 split-level or a custom build finished last year: the surface still looks fine long after the parts behind it have quit working. What actually decides the room’s lifespan is out of sight, a waterproof skin bonded tight to the wall, a shower base pitched to carry water to the drain instead of letting it pool, corners that hold their seal year after year, and a fan that truly pushes wet air outside rather than into the attic. A quick cosmetic refresh skips every one of those and still sells a listing photo. We build every wet zone to current code and run each fan duct straight outdoors, because on these quiet, tree-shaded streets the air stays damp for months at a stretch, and a fan that quietly empties into the attic instead has already written you a rot repair, just not the bill yet.
Skip the waterproofing details and you get a shower that looks fine for a decade and then does not. There are only three ways to build what sits behind Felida shower tile. The weakest is plain cement board with a smear of mastic; it typically fails somewhere past year fifteen, and this crew will not install it. A rigid foam panel system solves the problem by making the panel itself waterproof, no separate coating needed. What we build most often is the third option: a membrane, either a trowel-applied liquid or a sheet product, rolled across the backer board and carried without a gap through every corner, every seam, and every spot a pipe comes through the wall, with tile bonded straight on top of it. Whichever system a bid leaves out is exactly the layer standing between your framing and the water.
A second, separate waterproofing job happens at your feet. The shower floor has to tip evenly toward the drain, and if you want the step-free entry nearly every homeowner asks us for now, that tip has to begin lower than the floor just outside the shower. A brand-new custom build can frame that drop in from the subfloor up, which is one reason new construction here runs cheaper on this particular feature. Retrofitting the same shower into an existing 1970s ranch or split-level means cutting down the joists under that footprint or building up the floor around it instead, carpentry that gets decided before anyone mixes a bag of thinset.
Beyond that, which tile you choose is really a maintenance decision dressed up as a style decision. Oversized porcelain slabs cut the grout lines down to almost nothing, which means less scrubbing, but they need a wall surface flat enough to accept them and more hours to install. Go small, with a pebble or mosaic floor, and your footing improves in the wet but you take on far more seams to keep sealed. Marble and other natural stone look the part and absorb water at nearly the same rate, which means committing to resealing it on a schedule you cannot skip. Grout gets split two ways on our jobs: epoxy wherever a scrub brush and water will meet it, standard grout elsewhere, and a flexible caulk, never grout, at every corner where two planes meet and shift against each other.
Fixtures are where we tell clients to spend selectively. The valve buried in the wall, whether pressure-balanced or thermostatic, is worth paying for since it is sealed in for the life of the room; the handle and spout bolted to its face are cosmetic and swap out in minutes whenever taste changes later. A floating vanity can make a smaller Felida bathroom feel bigger, provided the blocking behind it goes into the studs before drywall closes the wall, a detail that has to be caught at rough-in or not at all. One caution on cabinetry: in a room that stays this humid, particleboard construction next to a shower tends to delaminate within a handful of years, nowhere near the lifespan of the room itself.
The last piece, and the cheapest line on the estimate, is the exhaust fan, and it carries an outsized share of the responsibility for whether this room lasts. Match the fan’s capacity to the square footage, route its duct the full distance to the outside air rather than dead-ending it in the attic, wrap that duct so it does not sweat condensation back into the housing, and control it with either a countdown timer or a humidity sensor. Felida gets roughly forty-one to forty-three inches of rain a year, heaviest from November into January, and a shower that cannot fully dry between uses in that climate is rotting on a predictable schedule. The fan is the cheapest thing on the invoice and the one most likely to decide whether you see us again in a decade.
This photo catches one of our bathrooms at the exact moment nobody usually thinks to point a camera: every finish already gone. Tile, tub, vanity and the old floor have all been hauled out, leaving bare original sheathing on one wall, loose insulation hanging between studs, an open drain stub standing alone where a toilet base used to sit, and the toilet itself parked off to one side since it always goes back in last.
The wall on the right tells a different story: all new lumber, not a patch job, because that is what a stud bay is owed after absorbing shower water for years. Supply lines are capped off for now, but the shower valve is permanently set in place already, at the exact height it will stay, since that single decision controls where every piece of tile ends up, and once backer board covers it, there is no revisiting the choice.
Nothing downstream in the job, not the tile pattern, not the fixture brand, swings the final bill or the room’s long-term health more than what gets decided right here, with the studs still showing. Pan slope, whether the entry sits flush with the hallway floor, the exact spot for a recessed niche, reinforcing a borderline joist before it is buried for good: every one of those calls has to happen now, because the next step seals all of them in permanently. That is the real reason we want you standing in the room at this point, not looking at a photo after the fact.
This turns up with some regularity in Felida, no matter which decade the house was built in: a shower run daily for two decades does the same quiet damage whether it sits in a 1970s split-level or a custom home from the 2000s. The difference with this crew shows up the moment we find it. We do not sub out structural carpentry to someone else; a soft joist or crumbling subfloor gets rebuilt immediately, at the number already written into your approved estimate, so the project keeps moving rather than pausing for a second company to get scheduled in.
The same handful of trouble spots turns up again and again. Right in front of the toilet, a little bounce in the floor traces back to a wax ring that failed years earlier without anyone noticing. Under the shower drain sits a joist that has gone dark and soft enough to dent with a thumbnail. Along the rim joist runs a punky stretch fed by a tub that has quietly overflowed onto the floor more than once. And wherever the exhaust fan has never done its job, softening shows up in the framing along that exterior wall. Opening the floor wide enough to find every one of those while it is already exposed is the only point where fixing a joist stays inexpensive.
Four things push a Felida bathroom estimate up or down, and relocation tops the list: move a toilet or shower to a different wall and you are paying for brand-new drain runs, not just new fixtures. From there it comes down to tiled square footage, the fixture tier you choose, and whatever turns up once the floor is actually open. A house where nothing moves and surfaces simply get refreshed sits at the low end of what we quote; gut the layout and run tile to the ceiling and you are near the top. Every number on our estimate is itemized, any floor damage we find becomes its own approved line item before we touch it, and if you already have a competing bid in hand, we will generally match or beat it by 10 percent.
Most homeowners guess wrong about where their money actually goes in a project this size. It is not the fixtures. It is labor: a forty-square-foot room still needs an electrician, a plumber, a framer, a waterproofer, a tile setter, a painter and a trim carpenter to each take their turn, and tile work alone is billed by the slow, careful square foot. Materials for tile and the membrane beneath it come next, priced by coverage rather than room size, which explains why tiling to the ceiling costs noticeably more than stopping at shoulder height. Fixtures and the vanity are whatever you choose to spend on them. The cheapest piece, almost always, is the plumbing rough-in, right up until a fixture relocation forces new lines underneath the floor.
One number stays fixed no matter how a quote gets trimmed elsewhere: the waterproofing behind the tile, which is also one of the smallest line items on the page. Cut that corner and you pocket a couple hundred dollars today in exchange for a repair that runs into the thousands a few years out, so we simply will not quote it that way. We would turn down the job entirely before building a shower we already know is going to fail.
10%
A photo of the trouble spot is the fastest way to get a real answer, not just a guess. Note whether the house is an older ranch or a newer build, since that changes what we expect to find. Reach out before 5pm for a same-day reply.
Expect a fast, contained mess rather than a weeks-long siege, since a bathroom is such a small footprint to begin with. Below is how the job actually unfolds, flagged with the points that sting most if a Felida household only has the one bathroom to work with.
Nothing about this job starts with a sledgehammer. Tile, the vanity and every fixture get special-ordered and confirmed in hand first, because a half-demoed bathroom waiting on a delayed tile shipment is the single most common way these jobs stall. Before day one we also walk through where the dust barrier sets up and which hallway or door the crew will use every day to reach the room.
Most demo days wrap inside a single day, with a second only needed on a larger footprint. The tub, tile, vanity and old flooring come out completely, dropping the room to open studs and subfloor so every issue the walls were hiding becomes visible in one pass.
This is the inspection point, not a formality. Framing, subfloor and the plumbing already in the wall all get checked while everything sits open to the studs. Anything damaged gets its own photo and its own price that same day, and nothing gets cut into further until you say go.
New plumbing and circuits reach their fixture locations, we set solid backing in the wall ahead of the vanity mount and anywhere a grab bar might go in later, and then the rough-in gets inspected under Clark County’s Building Safety program, since Felida is unincorporated with no city hall of its own to file through. That inspection is scheduled through the CC LMS portal, and nothing goes back together until it passes.
Four layers go on in a fixed order: backer board first, then a bonded waterproof membrane worked into a seal at every corner, along every seam and around each pipe, followed by the shower pan, and only then tile across the walls and floor. None of that order gets skipped or shuffled to save a day. Tiling itself eats the most calendar time of any stage, since thinset and grout harden on their own schedule, not on ours.
Finish work closes out the job in one steady push: the vanity and toilet go in, the mirror and shower trim get hung, the fan is wired and tested, and paint with trim carpentry rounds out the room. We then walk every item against your signed estimate before calling it done. Expect the toilet and sink to return to daily use several days before the shower is ready for its first real use.
Expect the toilet and sink to return to daily use well before the shower does, regardless of whether the house is an older split-level or one of Felida’s newer custom builds. The shower itself takes the longest to come back online: it has to be demoed, waterproofed, tiled, and left alone to cure before anyone can step inside it. Mention at the walkthrough that this is the only bathroom in the house and we will sequence the work specifically to shorten that window, not just note it and move on.
Pulling a dated tub for a walk-in shower is routine work here, and what we find underneath it tends to depend entirely on which era of Felida house we’re in. In a 1970s or 1980s ranch or split-level, the tub often hides a soft patch of subfloor where years of splashed water or a slow overflow went unnoticed. In one of the newer custom builds, the framing underneath is usually sound, though the drain still has to move and the wet area still gets fully waterproofed before new tile goes up the walls. Either way, expect new drain work and full waterproofing as part of the conversion, not an optional add.
That bit of give rarely means the floor itself is weak. It almost always traces back to the wax ring under the toilet failing at some point, after which every flush has sent a trace of water into the subfloor below. The fix is routine once the toilet is pulled, and it costs far less solved now, while the joist is still sound enough to dry and seal, than left for another wet season to work on it. Send us a photo of the area and roughly when the house was built, and we can judge how far it has likely spread before we ever open the floor.
Yes, whenever the work relocates plumbing, opens up wiring, or rebuilds structural framing under the floor. Felida has no city hall of its own, so that permit runs through Clark County’s Building Safety program instead, filed and tracked through the CC LMS online portal, with in-person help by appointment at the Public Service Center on Franklin Street in Vancouver. Evergreen Remodeling carries WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC, so filing that paperwork and showing up for each required inspection is on us, not you. Put every fixture back where it already sits with nothing structural touched, and in most cases no permit applies at all.
It depends more on the house’s age than anything else. A zero-threshold entry has to start lower than the floor around it, and in a 1990s-to-2020s custom build that drop is frequently planned into the floor from day one, so the upgrade barely changes the price. Retrofit the same shower into a 1970s ranch or split-level and someone has to either cut the existing joists down through that span or build the surrounding floor up to meet it, which is real carpentry, not a quick trade. We will know which path your house needs after checking a crawlspace from below or opening a small test section from above.
Picture four layers stacked in front of the framing: backer board goes on first, a continuous bonded membrane follows and gets sealed at every corner, seam and pipe, the tile sets directly onto that membrane, and grout or sealant closes the surface. It is the second layer, the membrane most people never see or ask about, that actually determines whether this shower is still sound in twenty years.
Yes, the fan matters here more than most people assume. Felida sees roughly forty-one to forty-three inches of rain most years, heaviest from November through January, and the large, tree-shaded lots in this part of town keep houses slower to dry between storms than a tightly packed subdivision would. Undersize the fan, or duct it into the attic instead of straight outdoors, and the room stays damp long after the water shuts off, which is exactly the setup that rots a floor on a schedule.
A full gut and rebuild rarely finishes in under two or three weeks, and most of that calendar time has nothing to do with anyone actively working in the room: grout and thinset need real days to cure, and a county inspection has to be scheduled before the next step can start. Finding soft framing once an older Felida ranch’s floor opens, or relocating the layout entirely, pushes that window out further. Keep the layout exactly as it is and skip any structural surprises, and the job lands on the shorter end of that range.
Our shop sits on SE 184th Ave in east Vancouver, a short run northwest to Felida with no bridge or river crossing involved, so we reach a Felida bathroom quickly. We remodel baths across the whole ZIP 98685 area: the large-lot custom and estate homes on quiet streets in Sunridge and Ashley Heights, the older ranch and split-level houses mixed in throughout Felida-Starcrest, and the bluff-top properties along the edge of town. Felida’s own name traces back to a quirky bit of history: when the local post office went in around 1890, the postmaster pushed for a name tied to his cat, and the community took its name from Felidae, the cat family. The ground nearby carries much older history too, close to the route the Lewis and Clark Expedition followed and near the site of Cathlapotle, a Chinookan town of several hundred residents.
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.
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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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