A Gresham bathroom seldom shows its real trouble on the surface. A shower pan that no longer seals, or a toilet set on a wax ring that failed years back, can push water into the subfloor long before a single tile moves. With rainfall pushing past 47 inches most years as the ground rises toward the Cascade foothills, that kind of slow soak has plenty of time to do real damage. We trace it to the source first, and putting back framing a hidden leak has ruined is work this crew handles itself, start to finish.
Licensed and insured. Oregon CCB #262707
On anything sent before 5pm
We match or beat most written estimates
Remodels completed
Dated finishes removed, every wet wall properly waterproofed, and new fixtures set throughout.
The pan is set level and checked for leaks before tile or glass goes in, since this area gets close to four feet of rain a year.
Soft subfloor and rotted framing from a slow leak get cut out and replaced in solid lumber, common in this area’s 1960s and 70s ranch homes.
Every wet surface gets a bonded waterproofing layer before any tile goes on, never bare backer board alone.
Humidity clears fast once the fan is sized to the room, worth getting right here where rainfall runs close to four feet a year.
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 area rarely fails at the surface. What actually decides how long it lasts is buried out of sight: the membrane bonded behind the tile, the pitch built into the shower pan, corners that hold their seal, and a fan that is genuinely ducted to open air. None of that shows up in a glossy photo, and a corner-cutting remodel skips every bit of it. We build every wet area to current waterproofing standards and route every fan duct outdoors, because with close to four feet of rain landing here most years, a fan that empties into the attic instead is simply a future rot repair we would rather not schedule with you.
Every tiled shower is built on one of three systems, and that choice does more to decide its lifespan than the tile glued to the front of it. What we build is a bonded membrane, sheet or liquid applied, carried over backer board and tied into one unbroken skin at the corners, the seams and every pipe, with tile set over the top of that. A rigid foam board reaches the same place by making the board itself the barrier. The old route, plain cement board skimmed with a bit of mastic, tends to give out somewhere around the fifteen-year mark, and it is not something we will build. Whatever a discount bid trims from that layer is the only thing standing between your subfloor and the water above it.
The shower floor carries the rest of the waterproofing. It has to pitch evenly toward the drain, and a curbless entry, which is what most people ask for now, needs that pitch to begin below the level of the surrounding floor. In a house that is already framed, as most of Gresham’s ranch and split-level stock is, that means either dropping the joists across that bay or building the rest of the floor up to meet it, a framing decision made long before anyone sets a tile. It is the reason a flush shower costs real money inside an older ranch home and barely registers when a floor is being framed new in one of the newer Pleasant Valley subdivisions.
Picking the tile itself mostly comes down to how much upkeep you want. Large-format porcelain leaves you with very few grout lines to scrub, though it needs a wall flat enough to take it and costs more in labor to hang. A smaller mosaic on the shower floor grips better underfoot wet but hands you back every one of those joints to maintain. Natural stone looks the part and drinks water just as readily, so a stone shower commits you to a resealing routine you cannot skip. Run epoxy grout anywhere water and a scrub brush meet, ordinary grout everywhere else, and a flexible sealant rather than grout at every inside corner, since a corner moves and grout there only cracks.
On the fittings, put the money into the valve and let your taste handle the rest. A pressure-balanced or thermostatic mixing valve disappears into the wall for good, so that is the one part you never want to reopen, while the handle and spout bolted to its face unscrew on any ordinary afternoon. Floating a vanity off the wall can open up one of these original split-level half baths, but the studs need solid blocking set first, a call made before the drywall closes. And next to a shower in a house that sees this much rain each year, a particleboard cabinet is good for maybe five years before it swells.
Last is the exhaust fan, the cheapest item on the whole estimate and the one piece that keeps the room from rotting out from the inside. Size it to the room, run the duct the entire way to open air rather than letting it dead-end in the attic, wire it to a timer or a humidity sensor, and wrap the duct so condensation does not drip back into the housing. Gresham holds onto its moisture a good part of the year, between the rain and the groundwater the Johnson Creek watershed keeps saturated, so a bathroom that never gets to dry out between showers rots on a schedule. That one inexpensive fan is the whole difference.
This is a genuine bathroom caught at the stage nobody thinks to photograph. Every finish is gone: the tile, the tub, the vanity, the old flooring, all of it hauled out. What remains is a wall of original plank sheathing, insulation sagging loose between the studs, a drain pipe standing open where the toilet once bolted down, and the toilet itself pushed to one side, since it is always the last fixture to go back.
The framing you see on the right is new. That wall was not patched. It was framed fresh, which is what studs earn once a shower has been quietly feeding them water. The supply lines are capped and the shower valve already sits locked at its final height, a step that cannot wait, since the valve position sets the whole tile layout and both disappear the moment the backer board goes up.
Nothing else in the job shapes the final cost, or how long the room lasts, the way this open stretch does. With everything still visible, we settle the calls that matter: how much fall the pan gets, whether the shower comes in flush with the floor, where the recessed niche lands, whether a joist needs a partner sistered beside it. Once that board goes up, every one of those answers is locked in for good, which is why we walk this room with you in person rather than send along a photo after it is closed.
We find this often in Gresham, particularly under a shower that has run daily for twenty-five or thirty years in one of the area’s older ranch homes. What sets us apart is the step that follows: rebuilding structure is work this shop does itself, not a job we farm out. Uncover a soft joist or a crumbling stretch of subfloor and we put it back right then, priced from a figure you already saw before demo, so the project keeps moving instead of stalling while a second contractor gets found.
The same handful of culprits turns up house after house. We often find a give in the floor just ahead of the toilet, left by a wax ring that quit years back with nobody the wiser. The joist directly beneath the shower drain has often gone dark and soft to a thumb. A stretch of rim joist goes punky where a tub overflow has crept into the wall cavity, which is common given how long this ground stays saturated near the Johnson Creek drainage. And framing along an exterior wall weakens in any room where the original fan never moved much air at all. We open things wide enough to find all of it while the floor is still exposed, because that is the only point where fixing a joist stays affordable.
The price follows a few factors more than any guesswork on our part. Relocating a fixture matters most, since moving the toilet or shower to a new wall means running fresh drain lines underneath. Next in weight is how much surface gets tiled, which tier of fixtures you settle on, and whatever the floor turns out to be hiding once it is opened up. Keep the layout untouched and simply update the finishes, and the number sits low. Reconfigure the room and run tile floor to ceiling, and the number climbs toward the top of the range. Every quote breaks out each piece on its own, and any damage found along the way is priced separately for you to sign off on first. Already have something in writing from another contractor? Forward it over, since we typically match or beat it by 10%.
Where that money actually goes tends to surprise most homeowners, since a bathroom crowds an unusual number of trades into a tight footprint. Labor is the largest share by a wide margin: setting tile is slow, exacting work billed by the square foot, and a room of maybe forty square feet still has to take on plumbing, wiring, framing, waterproofing, tile and finish carpentry, one trade after another. Tile and the waterproofing come next, and both scale with the surface you cover rather than the room itself, which is why running tile to the ceiling costs so much more than stopping at shoulder height. Fixtures and the vanity follow, entirely up to you. Last is the plumbing rough-in, cheap while nothing moves and costly the moment a toilet or shower changes walls.
The one figure we will not trim is the membrane tucked behind the tile, and it also happens to be one of the cheapest items on the whole estimate. Skip it and you save a couple hundred dollars today against a repair that runs into the thousands once this much rain finds its way behind the wall, so we will not quote it that way, and we would rather lose the job than build a shower we already know is going to fail.
10%
A few photos tell us the most, especially a close shot of anywhere the floor gives or a stain has spread. Reach us before 5pm and you get an answer that same day.
Square footage this limited does not give problems room to wander, which is a large part of why most of these jobs finish on a tight, predictable schedule. The rundown below shows the sequence we build in, called out where it matters most for a household with only one bathroom to its name.
Tile, fixtures and the vanity are all ordered and sitting in the shop before anything comes out. A bathroom torn open and then stuck waiting on a late tile shipment is the most needless delay in this trade. We also settle where the dust barrier hangs and which path the crew uses to reach the room.
Figure on one day, sometimes two. The tub, tile, vanity and old flooring all come out, leaving the room down to bare studs and subfloor so everything the walls were hiding shows at once.
This is the point where we inspect what the demo turned up, checking the framing, the subfloor and the old plumbing while all of it is still visible. Anything damaged gets documented in photos that same day, with a cost attached before we close any of it back up.
The plumbing and wiring get roughed in at their new locations, we fix solid blocking into the wall framing for the vanity and any grab bars, and an inspector from the City of Gresham Building Division signs off before anything is closed in. Nothing proceeds without that approval in hand.
Backer board goes up first, then a bonded membrane with every corner, seam and pipe sealed off, then the pan, and only after that the tile climbing the walls and running out over the floor. Tiling is the slow stretch and the one no one can rush, since thinset and grout cure on their own timetable, not on ours.
The last stage is finish work. The vanity goes in, the toilet gets reset, the mirror and shower glass go up, the exhaust fan gets wired, and paint plus trim carpentry round everything off. We then go through the space with you, comparing it item by item against what you approved. Typically the toilet and sink are usable several days before the shower is ready for its first use.
The shower is the piece that stays out of commission for the whole stretch, since it needs demolition, waterproofing, tile and time to cure before anyone can use it again. The toilet and sink typically return to service well before that. If yours is the only bathroom in the house, mention it when we scope the job and we will order the work so those two come back online first.
Yes, and it is one of the conversions we build most often in this area’s split-level homes. Plan on the drain being reworked, the entire wet zone waterproofed, and usually new tile run up the walls. Pulling the tub also opens up the floor it sat on, which in a house from the 1960s through the 1980s is often where years of a slow overflow have left the subfloor soft without anyone noticing.
That kind of softness almost never starts at the floor itself. It starts at the wax ring sealing the toilet base, and once that ring fails, water seeps down into the subfloor with every use, often for years before anyone notices the give underfoot. The fix is straightforward structural work on its own, and it only grows once another one of Gresham’s wet seasons has a chance to work on it. A picture of the spot is usually enough for us to judge how far it reaches before we ever lift a board.
If the job means relocating plumbing, opening up wiring, or rebuilding structural framing under the floor, then yes, and that permit runs through the City of Gresham Building Division and Development Services rather than a county office. We hold an Oregon contractor license, CCB #262707, so we pull the permit and schedule every inspection ourselves. Swap fixtures in the same spots with no structural work involved, and in most cases you will not need one at all.
Usually, yes, though what it costs rides entirely on how the floor beneath you is framed. A curbless base has to start lower than the surrounding floor, so in a ranch or split-level home that is already built, that means either dropping the joists across that span or raising the rest of the floor to meet it. Which approach fits depends on the framing, and we will know after a look from the crawlspace below or a small opening cut from above.
Working out from the framing, it is backer board first, then a bonded waterproof membrane sealed tight at every corner, seam and pipe, and only then the thinset and tile. That membrane is the part doing the real work of holding water back. Backer board alone soaks through like any other board, whatever a lower bid promises at the walkthrough, and leaving that membrane out is the shortcut we run into most once an older bathroom comes apart.
Here, with the rain pushing past 47 inches most years and the ground staying saturated near the Johnson Creek watershed, the fan matters more than almost anything else in the room. Undersize it, or let its duct dead-end in the attic instead of outside, and the room holds moisture for hours after the water shuts off, which is exactly what feeds rot in the framing and mold behind the vanity. Sizing it to the room, running the duct fully outdoors, and wiring it to a timer or humidity sensor costs very little while the walls are still open.
A full tear-out and rebuild typically runs three to four weeks start to finish, though the crew is not actually in the room working that entire stretch. Thinset and grout need real time to set, and the City of Gresham has to inspect the rough-in before anything gets covered, both of which add calendar days without adding labor hours. Moving the layout or uncovering rotted framing once the floor opens will stretch that window further. We hand you a day-by-day schedule with the estimate, and in a single-bathroom household we sequence the work so the toilet and sink are usable again well before the shower is finished.
Our shop sits on SE 184th Ave in east Vancouver, a run east across the Columbia on I-205 and on through the Portland metro to reach Gresham, so expect a longer drive than some of our closer stops, not a shorter one. We remodel baths all through the area, the older ranch and split-level homes filling northwest Gresham and Rockwood, the newer subdivisions out in Pleasant Valley and the Springwater area, the streets near downtown by Gresham Butte and the Springwater Corridor Trail, and on out toward Powell Valley and Orient along the Mount Hood Highway. Licensed in Oregon, CCB #262707, we are a frequent sight on this side of the river.
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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