Out in the new subdivisions spreading from old downtown and on the acreage at the edge of town, homeowners want the back of the house thrown open to the firs, the yard, and the refuge past it. A wide slider or a folding glass door delivers that. What catches people off guard is that opening up twelve feet of exterior wall is not a purchase. It is surgery on the structure: a header spanning the gap, posts walking its weight down, a footing beneath each one, and flashing tough enough for months of river-bottom damp. That half is on us. Setting the glass into it is the simple work.
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Cutting in a wide opening means pulling studs, framing a header over trimmers, and setting the unit so each panel tracks clean. River fog finds any gap, so the sill sits on a sealed pan and the jambs are flashed before cladding returns. Exterior trim follows, and the inside gets taped drywall, new casing and a coat of paint.
Taking out walls that hold weight, dropping in a beam matched to the span, and carrying the load onto posts and footings on firm ground.
Making a tight opening wider, shifting one down the wall, or cutting a new one through solid wall.
Lifting a header that has begun to sag, replacing a span framed too light, and tearing out the quick fixes an earlier remodel hid behind the drywall.
Siding and exterior trim seal the weather out, then drywall, casing, flooring and paint inside, the opening closed start to finish by the crew that framed it.
The wall came out, the beam went in, and two rooms became one. Same footprint on both sides of the line.
Drag the handle. Left, the wall between the kitchen and the next room opened up: studs exposed, the ladder standing in the opening, the floor covered. Right, the same footprint finished: a long island under pendants, and the two rooms reading as one.
Before After People picture a big door as a glass order. From where the house stands, it is a structural change. The twelve feet you want to open is bearing wall, and right now it is the reason the roof is not resting on the floor. Pull it out and that weight has to travel somewhere else: down a beam sized for the reach, into a post at either end, and on into a footing that lands on ground solid enough to take it. Shortchange the beam, the posts or the footings and your new door will report it for you, with panels that stick, a frame easing out of true, and hairline cracks walking up from the corners of the drywall. Down in the low, damp lots near the river the footings earn extra attention. The glass is the simple purchase. Giving the load a home is the actual job, permit and stamped engineering and all, and we do it.
This is where we sit down and help you choose. The unit takes the biggest slice of the budget, but the opening is what stays with the house long after you have forgotten the price.
Start with how you want the wall to move. A multi-slide runs its panels sideways on a track, parking them against the next run of wall or tucking them into a pocket if you build one, and of the choices it weatherseals the best, though one leaf stays put unless you pay for that pocket. A folding door, the accordion or bifold, hinges and stacks the whole set to one side so the opening clears end to end, which puts far more strain on the header above, the track it rides and the rollers beneath, and the price climbs to match. Wide French doors and lift-and-slides land somewhere between. More often than not the room settles it for you, since panels need a run of bare wall to slide across or a pocket to disappear into, and in plenty of our older downtown floor plans a chimney, a stair or a corner already lays claim to that wall.
Then the frame, which counts more than people expect, because over twelve feet it makes up a real share of what you look at every day. Vinyl costs the least and looks the heaviest, so those bulky sightlines are the price of the low number. Aluminum-clad wood turns warm wood to the room and a weatherproof face to the rain, and most of these jobs land on it. Thermally broken aluminum buys the slimmest frames and the broadest sheets of glass, and sits at the top of the range. Fiberglass falls in the middle on cost and hardly stirs as a cold, foggy Lake River morning warms into the afternoon, movement that matters far more across twelve feet than it ever would on a single sash.
Give the glass and the sill as much thought as the frame. Low-E coatings and an argon fill are simply the baseline now, and they earn their keep most on a west wall soaking up the long afternoon light. At floor level you choose between a flush sill, which looks clean and lets the room spill straight out onto the deck, and a raised one, which reads heavier but throws water clear far better. Flush is the harder detail to keep dry, so we set it only over a sound sill pan with a drainage plane behind it to send water back out. Tucked under a patio cover, flush is an easy call. Out on a wall that faces the long wet season head-on, we will steer you to the raised sill and lay out why.
On the structure there is nothing to choose, only arithmetic. The width of the opening and the weight of roof, floor and wall bearing on it decide whether the header is sawn lumber, an engineered beam or a steel section, and how heavy a post each end has to carry. Those posts cannot just perch on the subfloor and hope; the load has to travel all the way down, by a beam set underneath, a post dropped through the crawlspace, or a fresh footing poured for the job. When a wide-door bid comes in well under the rest, this is the line that quietly slipped off it.
Last is the finish, which decides whether the door looks born with the house or stuck on afterward. Outside, siding and exterior trim to blend in; inside, drywall, casing, flooring and paint to wrap the opening. Weaving fresh siding into boards weathered for decades, or matching a floor laid down twenty years back, is quiet, fiddly work of its own, and it tells most on an older downtown home with original trim worth saving. Carry all of it with one crew and the opening ends up looking like it was there from the first.
This is a real job on pause at the one step everything after it depends on. A big slider already fills the opening, the old gray lap has been cut back square around it, and up at the top corner someone is running a screw home through the white nailing fin that frames the unit.
The black membrane you can see climbing the jamb is the flashing, and it only works laid on in one direction, low to high, each piece draped over the one under it so water is always pushed out and away. Pan at the bottom, turned out across the wall below the sill. Jamb pieces onto the ends of that pan. Head over the tops of the jambs. Housewrap down across to cap it. It is the same trick that keeps a shingled roof dry. Put a single course on out of turn and rain works in behind the finish, feeding the studs for years with not a mark to see outside.
That is exactly why we would sooner stand you in front of an open wall than a finished one. The moment the casing and siding close across it, all of this disappears and you are left trusting the crew that did it. Rot repair is what we are best known for, and plenty of it begins right at a detail like this, hurried along just before a wet spell rolled in off the river. Better you watch the layers stack up now than hear us describe them once they are gone.
A door that spans the whole wall is, to the rain, one long joint that has to drain, and we get no shortage of rain here, roughly 44 to 45 inches in a normal year, plus the low fog off Lake River and the refuge that keeps a shaded wall wet far longer than the rain alone would. Three humble things keep that water out of the framing: a pan beneath the sill, flashing across the head, and a weather barrier shingled on in the right sequence. Botch the sequence and the good-looking opening slowly becomes the rot repair we are better known for. So we flash each of these as though we will be the ones called back to tear it open years on, and that habit is precisely why no one ever is.
Inside the house the structure plays by the same rules; weight is weight. The change people ask us for more than any other is to pull the wall that shuts a tight kitchen off from the living room. That wall might sit in a pre-1930 home near Pioneer Street, studs buried under lath and plaster, or in a newer subdivision house where the owner simply wants an island and a long sightline. Before anything, we settle one question: is the wall bearing? We cut in just enough to be sure, tell you plainly what is there, and when it does carry load, the figure we hand you already carries the permit, the engineered beam and the posts that hold it, with no low teaser that swells once the plaster is down.
Price one of these out and a single number runs away with the page: the door. Where it lands rides on the brand you pick, the glass package and the frame, so that part of the bill is really yours to set. What we build around the unit answers to three plain questions, the width of the hole, whether the wall is holding weight, and how much siding and interior work it takes to close everything back in. Each of those, the door, the structure and the finish, gets its own line on our quote, never buried in one figure. If a written bid from someone else is already in hand, send it along, because we match or beat most estimates by 10%.
The spread of costs here is unlike most remodels, where the money divides up fairly evenly. Here one item swamps the rest. Because of that, two careful bids on the very same opening can come in thousands apart on glass and frame alone, before a saw ever moves. Sitting beneath the door is the structure, the beam, its posts, and any work under the floor needed to land that weight on the ground. After that is the skilled labor of cutting a true opening and hanging a heavy unit square, plumb and tight to the weather. Then the finish on both sides. Last come the engineering fee and the permit, City of Ridgefield in the limits or Clark County outside them, small sums that are not optional.
Two things swing that total harder than any choice made in a showroom. The first is whether the wall bears weight, which an outside wall in Ridgefield nearly always does. The second is whether the posts at the ends have something real beneath them, since one perched over a void in the crawlspace drops us underneath to frame support, a carried beam or a poured footing, before the opening is safe to leave. That underfloor item is the very thing a bargain quote skips, and the one that later turns cheap into costly.
10%
A photo or two of the wall, both sides if you can manage it, is enough to get us started. Send it in, and if it arrives before 5pm the answer comes back that same day.
People work themselves up over a wall-sized opening, but across the whole job that wall is open only a day, two at most, and we schedule it to the hour. This is the order it runs in.
We come out, measure the opening, and chase down two things: the roof load pressing down from overhead, and whatever sits below the floor at the ends to receive it. When a span runs wide enough to require it, we bring in a structural engineer to size the beam and the posts beneath it, then stamp the plans. Those stamped drawings are what the City of Ridgefield, or Clark County past the city limits, writes the permit from.
Next the permit goes in, filed with the City of Ridgefield for a home in town or with Clark County for one out on the acreage, and we place the door order the same week. This part just takes patience; it disrupts nothing, since no board in the house has been touched yet. A door this wide is a built-to-order unit, and its lead time, not our schedule, usually decides when we break ground.
Before a single structural cut, the room gets ready. Furniture and floors disappear under protection, and a set of temporary walls goes up to pick the roof load up off the wall coming out. The real wall stays untouched until two things are true: the door is on site, and that temporary framing is already bearing the weight.
Shoring set, the old wall comes down, the sized beam and its posts go in, and the opening is closed back in and weathertight before the crew packs up. It is the single day the house stands wide open to the sky, so we read the Ridgefield forecast and hold it for a dry window once the river fog lifts.
The unit goes in, shimmed plumb and dead square, then fastened off. Then it is flashed in the only sequence that keeps water out: the sill pan to start, the jamb membranes lapped onto it, the head flashing over those, and the weather barrier brought down over the head last. The inspector sees all of it before any casing or siding ever covers it.
We button up the exterior first, with siding and matching trim, so the house is sealed up tight against the rain. The inside follows: drywall, new casing, flooring and paint. We hand the room back with a walkthrough, and after the new framing has had a few weeks to settle, we stop in again to adjust the door so it runs smooth and latches true.
The two behave differently, so the pick hangs on what you want that opening to do. A slider is the simplest piece of hardware, closes up the tightest, and leaves one leaf fixed for good. A folder concertinas its panels to one side and clears the whole view, though it runs dearer and demands a beefier header, a longer track and stronger rollers to carry the moving glass. Hand us the real opening and your number, and we will lay both out plainly, with no stake in the outcome, because the framing work costs about the same either way and only the bifold unit itself adds to the price.
You do. Any time a load-bearing wall comes out, or a wide hole gets cut into one, the work counts as structural, which triggers both a permit and inspections. A home inside the city is handled by the City of Ridgefield; one out on the unincorporated acreage goes to Clark County instead. Wider spans usually have to carry stamped engineering in the file as well. As a licensed Washington outfit, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC, we file that permit and arrange the engineer ourselves, so chasing paperwork never becomes your job.
Hardly any time at all. The rule here is simple: no blade touches the wall until the header material and the door are both delivered, and by the time we leave on the day it opens, the hole is dried in and sealed against weather. The trim and finishing come later, long after the house is buttoned back up.
Yes, and it turns up more than you would think: a sound door dropped into an opening built wrong. In most cases the header was too light for the span or the flashing was left out. We take the surround apart, set the structure right, re-lay the flashing in the proper order, and reset the door so it runs true again.
How wide you can go is a question for the framing, not the showroom. Twelve feet is our everyday upper range, and reaching further is possible with engineering, assessed for each opening. As the opening stretches, so must the beam above it, stepping from ordinary lumber up to an engineered member and then to steel, each step calling for bigger posts and a sturdier route to the ground at each side. We cut nothing until those numbers have been run, and the sizing is never something we let a door salesman do.
Not if the opening is built right, and this is really a flashing problem, not a door one. The weatherproofing goes on bottom to top, every layer shingled over the one beneath so rain always runs back outside: the sill pan, then the jambs, then the head, then the housewrap. When we do get a call about a leaking wide door, the door is rarely the culprit; it is an opening where the flashing went on in the wrong order.
You can stay. Before anything is cut, we shore the roof with temporary framing, so the actual wall stands open a single day, not weeks, and we close it back in before leaving that night. What helps us most is an emptied room and a bit of patience during the one noisy day of cutting and setting the beam. Beyond that one day, the rest of your home keeps running as usual.
In most cases we can, and an unbroken floor running from the room out to the deck, no step between, is worth it. It hinges on how the sill is detailed. A low, flush sill is the part of the opening that fights water hardest, so we set it only over a proper pan built to catch and shed whatever gets in. Under a patio cover, we say yes without worry. On a wall left fully exposed through months of rain, we will be straight about what you trade for that clean line, then let you choose.
We run out of a shop at 505 SE 184th Ave on the east side of Vancouver. From there it is a straight shot north on I-5 into Ridgefield, no bridge and no river to cross. That same framing and big-opening work takes us right through the city: the fast-growing subdivisions around the new schools, the acreage on the edges of town, the old streets on the bluff by Pioneer Street and Main Avenue, and the homes with a view over Lake River and the refuge. The rest of north Clark County is in the same reach.
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
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
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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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