Our main line of work
Wood Rot Repair in Battle Ground, WA
Rot is a moisture problem long before it is a carpentry problem, and in Battle Ground the moisture gets plenty of help. We sit inland in the foothills under a heavy stand of Douglas fir and cedar, and that canopy keeps the sun off shaded north walls, roofs and decks for most of the year. Shade on top of a wet season that runs from fall into late spring, around 50 to 52 inches of rain, leaves wood damp and growing moss when it ought to be drying out. The houses we open up most are the older ones around downtown carrying their original siding, and the places out on the acreage tucked back in the trees. A repair that actually holds means tracing the water to where it started, cutting back past the last soft fiber, and rebuilding whatever carries load before any siding goes back. It is most of what we do.
Licensed and insured. WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC
On anything sent before 5pm
We match or beat most written estimates
Remodels completed
Where the rot turns up
Across most of the year, water reaches nearly every joint and seam a house has, and the shade keeps it from drying out again. These are the spots it hits first, and the ones we open up most:
Exterior trim and siding
The first boards to meet rain and the needles off the firs: window and door casing, corner boards gone soft at the base, belly bands and water tables, and the sheathing hiding behind them.
Decks and the ledger
Decking that gives underfoot, the joists and beams under it, and the ledger pinning the whole deck to the house wall. On a shaded acreage deck that carries moss and dropped needles half the year, that ledger holds water longest and fails first.
Load-carrying framing
The framing down low, rim joists, sill plates, studs and post bases, pulling damp out of the soil for years. We meet it most in crawlspaces on the rural lots east and north of town.
Flashing at windows and doors
Flashing that failed years ago and has steered rain into the wall ever since, with the shade here keeping that cavity from drying between wet weeks.
Soft subfloors in baths and kitchens
A shower pan or drain line seeping slowly for a few months turns the subfloor under it soft, well before a tile cracks or the floor feels off.
Not sure what you are seeing?
Send a couple of photos along with a note on what you are seeing. If it lands with us before 5pm from anywhere around Battle Ground, you get a reply the same day. And if it is something we would be wrong to take on, we will say so and tell you why.
One wall, opened and put back
On rot work this is the only proof that means anything. A finished photo shows a wall. A pair shows what was behind it.
Drag the handle. On the left, a shower we opened after a slow leak, with the stained framing, the insulation and the subfloor drain all exposed. On the right, the same corner rebuilt as a glass walk-in shower.
Before After Why a photo cannot price it
Whatever is visible from the yard is only the end of the trouble, not the start of it. The decay moves inside the grain, hidden by paint and siding, so the soft patch or dark stain you can press on marks where it finally stopped, not where it began. On a north wall kept in shade and damp through most of the year, those two points can sit a long way apart. A number built off a photo is really a number built on luck, and that luck runs out as a change order the morning the wall is opened.
So we come and look at it in person, hands on the wood. We mark off what can be known from the outside from what only shows once the wall is open, and the estimate follows that split: the sure work at a set price, the rest on a line of its own that you okay before anybody makes a cut. You are never left wondering which figure is firm, because it is written down that way.
What the fir canopy holds against the siding
On acreage lots shaded by tall Douglas fir, the canopy blocks the sun that would normally dry a wall out after a storm. Humidity sits close to the siding longer here than on an open lot, and that extra drying time is usually where rot gets its start.
What goes back on, and why
Cutting the rot out is the easy part. The part that decides whether we are back in ten years is the material we set in its place.
Matching the existing woodwork comes first, because a repair anyone can spot later is a repair botched. Take an older place around the Main Street core that still carries its original cedar corner boards: cedar goes back, milled to the same profile. If that profile dropped off the market long ago, we laminate it up from stock until its reveal and its shadow line settle in with the boards on each side.
Cedar and redwood owe their staying power to the oils sealed into the heartwood, and the sapwood milled into today’s boards falls well short of the old growth it stands in for. Primed finger-jointed pine costs little and paints up nicely, yet it rots quickly wherever moisture lingers, which beneath these trees is most of the year, so it stays off the ground and off the bottom of any trim run. Cellular PVC and fiber cement will not rot at all, which makes them the right choice at the places that keep giving out, the foot of a corner board, a water table, the casing below a window with no head flashing. They run more per foot and save you a third trip to that same corner.
Framing is judged on its own terms. Whatever sits on concrete or rides near grade comes back pressure-treated, since plain fir pressed against a wet foundation is exactly how the original sill rotted away. When we sister a joist or set in a new stud, it is Douglas fir, sized and fastened so it bears what the piece before it bore, not just enough to close the gap.
The fasteners matter more than most people think. Modern treated lumber is full of copper, and copper chews through plain galvanized steel, so every screw and nail driven into treated wood or cedar is hot-dipped galvanized or stainless. Put an ordinary screw in a cedar board and within a season, black streaks bleed down the face, and no amount of paint will hide them after that.
Every board is primed on all six sides before it ever goes up, the cut ends along with the faces. Raw end grain soaks water up the way a straw does, and whether or not that one step gets done says more about how long the repair will stand than whatever brand is on the paint can.
Just the board, or the wall behind it
What a rot repair really costs comes down to four questions. The first two you can answer yourself, screwdriver in hand, in under an hour.
Does it carry weight? A piece of trim, a water table, the lowest row of siding, none of those hold the house up, so a rotten one is an afternoon gone and little more. A rim joist, a sill plate, a post base or a deck ledger changes the whole picture, because the building leans on it, and that means shoring, solid replacement wood, and a permit with an inspection. Which office issues the permit depends on where you are: the City of Battle Ground Community Development Department within the city limits, Clark County out on the acreage and the lots around town. The board itself is never what drives the price. It is getting it out from under a load without anything shifting.
How far does the rot reach? Set the screwdriver against the board every few inches and press until you find the point it no longer sinks in, then carry on a good foot past that. The decay has already run along the grain further than the surface lets on, and stopping where the visible damage stops is the number one reason a fix fails and gets redone.
Does epoxy have a place here? Here and there it does, and we will point it out. Consolidant and filler genuinely help on a shaped piece that is no longer made, a sash, a turned porch column, a stretch of antique trim, so long as the damage sits in a pocket rather than running clean through. For anything holding load they do nothing, and they are not a way to skip opening the wall. A contractor pushing epoxy on a soft sill plate is quietly booking the job twice.
And what is directly over it? That answer is what decides whether any of the rest holds. The water found its way in higher up: a kickout flashing never installed where a roof meets a wall, a gutter choked with fir needles that overruns in a downpour, siding stuffed down into a planting bed, a deck ledger with no cap flashing lapped across it. We find that source and shut it before a stick of new wood goes in, billed on the same sheet, because fresh lumber under a live leak is simply paid for twice.
What it ends up costing
The honest truth is the bill follows the amount of rot, and there is no knowing the amount for certain until the wall or the deck comes open. A few things hold true ahead of that. A small job kept to one spot, a short length of trim or a handful of spongy deck boards, sits at the cheap end. Bring joists, sills or post bases into it and the figure jumps, since structural work drags shoring and an inspection along behind it. And the biggest lever of all is how many seasons the leak has been fed. In a climate this wet, the least expensive repair is forever the one you tackle now instead of next year.
Where the money really goes catches people off guard. Lumber is the cheapest part of a rot bill. The costly end is labor and getting at the work: setting up staging or a ladder plan, peeling siding back far enough to reach behind the rot, carrying the load on temporary posts while a bad one comes out, then closing the wall so you cannot tell anyone was there. The same ten feet of rotten trim runs well over twice as much up under the eaves as it does at arm’s reach, and two small repairs at opposite ends of the house cost more than one larger one in a single spot.
Laid out in order, the bill leads with labor, then the weatherproofing that locks the fix in for good, flashing and house wrap, siding, primer and paint, then the lumber, and a permit with inspection last if the work carries load. Anything that has to be taken off and hung back up shows up on its own line, a downspout, a gutter, a light, a run of deck rail, a dish bolted to the eave, so the part of the number that is wood and the part that is access read straight off the page.
Already have a written estimate from someone else? Pass it over too. On most written bids we will either meet that number or beat it by 10%, and that commitment goes in writing.
10%
Have a written bid already?
Send it over with a shot or two of the problem area. Reach us before 5pm and the answer comes that day.
What the work is like day to day
Nearly all of a rot repair takes place on the outside of the house, not in the rooms you live in, which makes it one of the gentler projects to have underway while the household keeps to its routine. Here is roughly how it unfolds.
Before a board comes off
Before any siding comes off, we do a lap of the property with you and tag the sections slated for removal. From there we work out where staging, lumber, and the dumpster land, which on a treed acreage lot is its own small puzzle. Anything fragile within reach of that wall gets pulled back first, your hands or ours.
The day it comes open
Count on noise this day. We strip the siding and trim off across the morning, and the framing is laid bare by early afternoon. Those bare hours are when we find out whether the extra work you signed off as possible is really there.
If there is more under it
If we turn up something worse than the price once the wall is open, you hear it the same day, with photos, before another cut is made. Nothing listed under possible extent moves until you say go.
Fresh framing, then dried in
The new framing and sheathing go in, then flashing and house wrap the same day we get that far, so an open wall never has to ride out a wet night uncovered. If a wet spell shows up early, we board the opening over and tape it off until the sky clears.
Putting it back together
On goes the siding, the trim after it, then sealant and the first coat of primer. By now the place looks done from the curb, and it is usually around here that a neighbor strolls up to ask who is doing the work.
The finish coat and a walk
The topcoat goes on at the very end. After that we sweep the yard clean and walk the finished work with you, matching it to the estimate point by point. The offcuts, the rotted wood we pulled and the dumpster all get hauled off on our way out.
What Battle Ground homeowners ask
Is that rot, or just old paint letting go?
The quickest check is to press the wood with a screwdriver tip. If it holds firm, you are probably looking at paint that has simply given up; if the tip pushes in and the wood feels soft or crumbles away damp, the rot is already working underneath. Blistered, flaking paint in patches is often the first hint that something is wrong behind it. Send us a photo with a line about what you found, and if it comes in before 5pm we answer that day.
Will you just replace the boards I point at?
Every so often that really is all of it, and when it is, you will hear so from us plainly. But if the soft wood carries on past the piece you singled out, we will not skin fresh boards over it and act like the job is wrapped. Rot pays no attention to a cover; it keeps eating the wood behind the new material, and a second visit to put that right costs more than doing the job fully the first time.
What if it is worse once the wall is open?
We run into it enough that the quote is built to expect it, not to surprise you partway through. Whatever we can verify from outside the wall is priced on its own; whatever the opened wall might reveal is set down separately, with a figure of its own. None of that second portion begins until you have looked at the photos and given us the nod to keep going.
Does insurance cover wood rot?
Whether a claim gets paid turns on your particular policy and on how the water got in, so that call belongs to your insurer, not to a contractor. What we bring to it is a plain record, photos and written notes of everything we expose as the wall opens, so you walk into any claim conversation with evidence rather than a story.
Who takes care of the permits?
That falls to us any time a job needs one. Replacing structural framing or rebuilding the load path under a deck requires a permit, and who issues it comes down to where the home stands: inside the city, the City of Battle Ground Community Development Department; out on the acreage and unincorporated lots nearby, Clark County. Wider spans can need engineered, stamped plans. We hold a Washington contractor license, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC, so filing it and booking the inspection are ours. Cosmetic siding or trim alone usually needs no permit.
How long does the work take?
Plan on a day or two for a repair kept to some trim or a run of siding. Once structure is involved the timeline grows, because each step, propping the load, the inspection, drying the opening back in, has to follow the one before it, and the topcoat needs dry air to harden. You will find a day count in the estimate. You can go about your days for most of the work; the single day we want you on hand is the one the wall opens, because a decision on what is hidden behind it may fall to you then.
Can you match siding and trim that is out of production?
Almost always. Lap siding, shingle courses and the everyday trim profiles are still sold or can be cut to order at a mill, and for a shape that has truly left the market we glue one up from stock until its reveal and shadow line fall in with the boards next to it. Paint is the simple part: with the old can or a color code it is quick, and without them we take a match from a chip lifted off the wall.
Is one time of year better for this?
The dry stretch from roughly late June into September is the easy window, because the wall is open for the shortest time then. We still take these repairs every month of the year, though, sealing each section back up as we go rather than saving it for one push at the end. Holding out for a dry spell usually costs more than it saves, since the water keeps running the whole time you wait and a small soft patch just grows into a bigger one.
The ground we cover
We keep our shop at 505 SE 184th Avenue in east Vancouver, and from there it is a straight shot north on SR-503 into Battle Ground, no river crossing, so a job up here does not cost us half a day in traffic. We work the whole city, from the older homes with their original siding around downtown and the Main Street core, to the new subdivisions that have filled in fast at the edges, and on out to the rural acreage east and north through Hockinson, Venersborg and Heisson, plus Brush Prairie and Meadow Glade to the south and Yacolt up toward the foothills. We hold a Washington contractor license, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC.
The rest of what we do
What homeowners say
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
We talked to 4 different contractors and only David, of Evergreen, took the time to climb up to our roof to check out the job. The others gave us bids based upon a photo. Evergreen was not the cheapest but the extent of the work they did was worth every penny.
Steve K.Roof and exterior work
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
Tell us what needs fixing
Send photos and a short description. If it arrives before 5pm you get an answer the same day.
Already have a written estimate from someone else? Send that too. We match or beat most estimates by 10%.
- Call(971) 715-0673
- Emaildavid@evergreenremodeling.co
- Office505 SE 184th Ave Unit 320, Vancouver, WA 98683
- LicenseWA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC
