A lot of the kitchens we get called to in Gresham trace back to the same floor plan: a narrow galley shut off from the dining room, built into a ranch or split-level somewhere between the 1960s and the 1990s on one of the city’s 6,000- to 8,000-square-foot lots. Out in Pleasant Valley and Springwater the rooms already open onto a great room, but the cabinets and counters are the same tract-grade stock the builder installed decades back, and owners are ready to swap it out. Whichever kitchen you have, the cabinets, the counters, the plumbing, the gas line and the wiring behind them move together on our schedule, managed by the same crew from the day the first box comes off the wall.
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Remodels completed
Removing the partition that walls off a split-level galley, or framing in an island where the original floor plan never left room for one.
The old cabinets come out, the new run goes in, and we shim and scribe every box so the line finishes flush to walls that have settled for fifty years.
A sink relocated, fresh circuits pulled for the counters, power run out to the island, and GFCI protection everywhere code calls for it near water.
A hood ducted through the roof or an exterior wall, never looped back through a filter into the uppers above it.
Flooring, paint, trim and hardware are the final layer here, added once Gresham’s own building inspector has signed off on everything behind the walls.
A finished photo shows you a kitchen. A pair shows you the work: the same window over the sink, before the boxes came out and after the last door went on.
Drag the handle. Left, the kitchen as we found it: the old boxes with the doors off, everything pulled out, the window over the sink the one thing worth keeping. Right, the finished run: shaker fronts, a stone counter straight through to the window, the dishwasher beside the sink.
Before After Three decisions shape most of a Gresham kitchen budget, and all three are worth settling before anyone picks up a hammer. First is movement: leave the sink, range and refrigerator on the walls they already occupy and you have a refresh; relocate even one and you are into subfloor and framing and a true construction project. Second is the dividing wall. Most of the ranch and split-level houses built here between the 1960s and the 1990s still carry a partition separating the kitchen from the family room, and whether that partition holds up the roof or a second floor decides between an afternoon of carpentry and an engineered beam. Because we frame our own structural work, you get that answer early, with a straight number attached, not a referral to another trade weeks later. Third is cabinet grade, and nothing else on the sheet swings the total as hard.
Few parts of a kitchen job benefit more from an in-person conversation than this one. Four choices below are what actually decide how the finished room looks, and together they carry most of the weight on your estimate.
Cabinets take the largest bite out of any kitchen estimate, so start by sorting out the three tiers before you set foot in a showroom. Stock is the catalog option, a fixed menu of widths you accept as listed and bridge with filler strips wherever an older wall refuses to cooperate, and it is the cheapest way in. Semi-custom keeps those same factory boxes but opens up the choices that matter, the door style, the finish, the depth, how the interior is fitted out, and it is the tier most Gresham kitchens in this range settle on. Full custom is milled to the room you actually have, and it only earns its cost when the walls run well out of plumb, which is common after sixty years of settling in these ranch and split-level houses, or when you want something no catalog carries.
What survives past the first decade is the box, not the door everyone falls for in the showroom. Plywood sides joined with dadoes hold together for the long haul, while particleboard pinned together with cam locks eventually works loose, and the first place it gives out is the cabinet under the sink, where a drip nobody noticed turns the panel to mush. Give the drawer boxes the same scrutiny. A dovetailed hardwood drawer riding a concealed full-extension glide is nothing like a stapled carton scraping along a plastic rail, and these are the parts your hands are on every single day the kitchen is in use.
A countertop is a set of trade-offs, not a clear winner. Engineered quartz is dense, even-toned and needs no upkeep, though setting a pan straight off a burner onto it can scorch the resin. Granite and quartzite shrug off that same heat and carry real depth and movement in the stone, provided you reseal them on a schedule. Butcher block runs warm and inexpensive and signs you up for ongoing oiling. Laminate has outgrown its old reputation and still fails first at the seam next to the sink. Before a material is even chosen, the slab count, the edge profile and how far the counter reaches out for stools are already moving the price.
On the backsplash, the tile matters less than the grout line and how the rows finish out under the hood and against the wall cabinets. A plain stacked or offset layout reads calm and goes up fast. Herringbone or a picket pattern runs the labor cost up through the cutting, not through the tile itself. Underfoot, porcelain is the toughest option, the slowest to set and the coldest to stand on. Engineered wood pairs best with wood cabinetry. Luxury vinyl plank rides out a dishwasher leak without swelling, which counts for something in a city that pulls close to four feet of rain a year off the foothills.
Two inexpensive choices pay for themselves many times over. Spec soft-close hardware on every hinge and every slide, because the one you skip becomes the door that bangs at you for years. And build the lighting in three layers: an overhead wash for the whole room, task strips tucked under the uppers for the counter you actually chop on, and a fixture hung above the island or the table. Trying to add a switch leg after the drywall is closed up is the single most avoidable change order on a kitchen job.
Three choices behind this that read like shopping, but really land on the carpenter, the electrician and the duct run.
Nothing on this job has a longer lead time than cabinets, so the appliance list has to be settled before that order ships, since appliance choices are what actually size the boxes around them. Swap a gas range for induction and you are buying electrical work as much as a new appliance: a dedicated 240-volt circuit has to reach the cooktop, and the gas line being retired gets capped off to code, never just pulled loose and left behind the cabinet. A fridge that sits counter-depth or panel-ready reshapes the opening and whatever boxes sit beside it, and a slide-in range needs its own cabinet configuration, different from what a freestanding model sits in. Settle these choices after the cabinets are already ordered and you are either stuck waiting on a second order or stuck living with a compromise.
The hood is the piece owners put off and regret later. Ducted properly, it carries steam, grease and smell straight out of the house. Fit a recirculating unit instead and it only strains the air through a filter and returns it to the room, which is why the cabinet doors right above one start to feel tacky. Whether a duct can actually reach outside, through a joist bay, up a chase, out a gable end, is a question for the drawings, not for framing day, and in these low-pitched ranch roofs with their shallow attics, that path is not always a given.
A modern kitchen also asks more of the electrical panel than the room it replaces. Code wants the countertop outlets on their own small-appliance circuits, with separate feeds again for the range, the dishwasher, the disposal and the microwave, and GFCI protection anywhere a receptacle sits near the sink. A good number of the ranch and split-level houses built here before 1990 are still running the panel they were built with, every slot already spoken for, and when that is the case a service upgrade rides along with the remodel, priced into the estimate from the start rather than sprung on you the morning the electrician shows up.
Both frames are the same kitchen, photographed the day the final punch list items were checked off. What neither finished picture tells you is that this room used to be fully closed off from the living area, with no opening at all. The broad cased passage you see beside the island is ours, cut through what had been a solid wall and trimmed to match casing already running through the rest of the house, so it reads as original construction rather than something added on.
Down the long wall, the cabinets are flat slab fronts in a warm wood finish, run straight up to the ceiling with no soffit boxed in above them. Skipping that soffit is what turns a tall wall into something that looks intentional. One slab of stone serves double duty as the counter and a low backsplash ledge, carried without a seam the entire length of the wall in the cabinet photo, with the outlets dropped into the ledge rather than cut through the face of the stone.
The island absorbed most of the difficulty on this job. It holds the cooktop and the sink both, so gas, water, a drain and power all had to travel to the center of a floor that started with none of it, while the hood drops from the ceiling on its own separate duct run. Add pendant lights overhead, stool seating along the back edge, and an island squared up to the new opening into the living room, and the finished space gives away none of the construction that got it there.
A kitchen is as good as any room in the house at hiding a slow leak. The dishwasher supply, the sink base, the thin icemaker line behind the fridge: any one of them can weep for years behind a closed cabinet door, and you only find out once the old boxes are stripped out. Gresham sits where the land starts climbing toward the Cascade foothills and pulls close to four feet of rain a year because of it, and that kind of moisture keeps crawlspaces and subfloors damp longer than drier ground does. Because wood rot repair is where this company started, a soft subfloor on tear-out day in one of these ranch kitchens is a cost we already know how to price, not a surprise we lean on to inflate the number. Where access allows, we look before we quote.
Cabinet grade moves the number more than anything else, then whether plumbing or gas has to travel, then the counter material, then the size of the room. A kitchen that keeps its existing footprint and only swaps cabinets and counters lands near the bottom of the range. Open the wall between the kitchen and the family room, build in an island and reroute the services, which is the ask in a lot of these older ranch homes once owners are ready to open them up, and the number climbs toward the top. Your estimate itemizes every line so the real driver is never a mystery, and if a competitor has quoted the same scope in writing, we match or beat most estimates by 10%.
It is worth seeing how unevenly that spend lands before you settle on a figure. Cabinets almost always claim the largest share, often by a wide margin. Labor sits right behind, and labor is the line that grows the moment the layout changes. Counters and backsplash come in third. Appliances are next and rest entirely in your hands. The trades hidden in the walls, wiring and plumbing, stay inexpensive as long as nothing moves and climb fast the instant a fixture or a wall does. Flooring, paint and trim close out the list.
Lined up that way, it is easy to see how two kitchens the same size can finish thousands apart. Leaving the sink and range on their current walls, or refacing cabinet boxes that are still sound instead of tearing them out, brings the total down without the finished room looking any less complete. Every one of those choices is broken out on your estimate, so where you save stays your call, not ours.
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Send a few photos of the kitchen as it sits now and a line on what you want changed. Reach us before 5pm and you hear back that same day.
No room gets missed like a kitchen once it is torn apart, so we plan the order of the work as carefully as the work itself. Here is how a Gresham remodel moves, step by step, with the hardest stretch called out ahead of time.
We stand up a stopgap kitchen in a spare room before anything comes out: a working sink, the fridge, a microwave and a kettle. Floors along the crew’s path get covered, the work area gets sealed off from the rest of the house, and we settle on an entrance that keeps the dust away from the rooms you are living in.
Cabinets, counters, the floor and any wall marked to come down all go in this stretch. Plan on a day or two of real noise behind sealed plastic, and this is when we get the first honest look at what has been sitting behind and under the old cabinets.
Framing goes in first, then plumbing, gas and electrical are run to their new locations, and the hood duct is carried out through a wall or the roof. Nothing gets closed up until the City of Gresham Building Division has inspected the rough work and signed off, since Gresham issues and inspects its own permits rather than routing them through a county office.
Drywall goes up, then comes the mud, the sanding and the paint, with the new floor set down last of all. This is roughly where the room quits looking like a construction site and starts reading like a kitchen again.
Setting and leveling the cabinets happens first, and the counter shop only templates once that is finished, because its measurements come from the boxes as they truly sit, never from a plan on paper. The span between that template appointment and the day the finished stone arrives is the toughest patch to live through, since the sink sits disconnected from water the entire time. We tell you those dates at the outset of the project, not somewhere around the fourth week.
Last to go in are the stone, the sink, the appliances, the tile backsplash and all the hardware, and once that is done we sit down with you and go through the completed room point by point against what the estimate promised. Water returns to the sink that same visit, and that is the moment this is your kitchen again, not a job site.
Not the whole time, but we leave you more than an empty room. Before anything comes apart we set up a stopgap kitchen in a spare room, with a sink that runs, the fridge, a microwave and a kettle, and we keep it going as long into the schedule as the work allows. The stretch to plan around is the wait between the counter template and the day the finished stone goes in, when the sink itself has no water, and we hand you those exact dates before demolition starts so nothing in that window catches you by surprise.
There is no way to tell from the finished side of the drywall. Someone has to open a section and look at the framing and whatever it is carrying from above, and in a lot of Gresham’s ranch and split-level houses that means a quick cut into the wall to see which way the ceiling joists run. Because our own crew handles structural framing, you get a straight answer and a firm price for taking the wall out directly from us, with no second contractor to bring in and no extra week lost waiting on one.
It comes down to scope. Keep the same footprint and a refresh wraps up quickly; open the wall to the next room and reroute the plumbing and wiring and the calendar stretches out. What paces nearly every job is cabinet lead time, so we place that order before any demolition starts rather than after, and the stone template adds its own fixed wait once the boxes are standing. You get a schedule with real dates attached to the estimate, not a loose guess.
We install cabinets no matter who bought them. Have us place the order and it is one less thing for you to track, or source the boxes on your own and send them straight to us, since the leveling, the scribing and all the filler work gets done to the exact same standard either way. The part that falls on you when you supply your own: freight damage and missing pieces are a claim against the seller, not us, so open every box and count the contents as soon as the truck arrives.
Start with the condition of what is already hanging on the wall. Sound boxes paired with a layout you are not fighting make refacing the smart move, since it hands you a kitchen that looks brand new for a fraction of what tearing everything out costs, and plenty of the original cabinetry in Gresham’s older ranch homes still qualifies. Once the boxes are falling apart, the layout gets in your way every time you cook, or you want to move things around entirely, that is when new cabinetry earns its higher price. We look at yours in person and say plainly which side of that line it falls on.
Templating cannot happen until the cabinet boxes are physically installed and shimmed level, because the counter shop measures the room as it actually sits, never off a floor plan. Once that measurement is taken, the slab still has to be cut and polished at the shop before a truck ever brings it to your house. There is no version of this where the steps run out of order or faster, so that waiting period shows up on your schedule from the first estimate rather than catching you off guard halfway through the job. Of everything on the calendar, this is the stretch that runs longest.
Most of the time, yes. The moment a job touches wiring, plumbing, gas, or takes out a wall that carries weight, it becomes permitted work. Gresham issues and inspects its own permits through the City of Gresham Building Division rather than routing them through a county office, so that is who we file with and schedule inspections through on your behalf. We hold an Oregon contractor license, CCB #262707, and we handle the paperwork start to finish. A simple swap of cabinets and counters with no trade work behind it usually does not need one.
More electrical work than appliance shopping. An induction range needs a dedicated 240-volt circuit of its own, and the gas line it replaces has to be shut off and capped to code, not just disconnected and left in the wall. The question worth settling early is whether the panel already in your ranch or split-level house has room for the added load, and we work that out on paper before anything is closed up, since it is a cheap question then and a costly one later.
Our shop is on SE 184th Avenue in east Vancouver, a run across the Columbia on I-205 and then east through the Portland metro on Powell Boulevard to reach Gresham, so a kitchen out here is still a straightforward trip. We work across the whole city, from the older ranch and split-level homes in Rockwood, Centennial and Powell Valley to the newer subdivisions filling in through Pleasant Valley and the Springwater area, and on through downtown Gresham, Northwest Gresham and the streets near Gresham Butte, plus neighboring Fairview, Wood Village and Troutdale.
Three of the 50 reviews on our Google profile, in the homeowners' own words.
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
We had a small but very unique project and this team handled it with a great attitude. They were responsive, on time, and the finished work looks like it was always meant to be there.
Paige T.Small custom project
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
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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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