What keeps us busiest
Wood rot is a moisture problem that only turns into a carpentry problem later, and the houses around Salmon Creek give moisture a long head start. Most of this community went up as subdivisions between the 1980s and the 2000s, so a lot of the original builder-grade siding, trim and flashing is now two to four decades old and running out of life. Pile on roughly 41 to 43 inches of rain across a long wet season, fir and cedar that shade north walls so they never dry, and the creek-bottom fog that settles on the lower lots near the greenway, and you have wood that stays wet most of the year. Making a repair hold means finding where the water gets in, taking the wood back well past the last soft fiber, and setting the load-bearing framing right before any siding returns. It is the heart of what we do.
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Give water most of the year and it works into most of the exterior seams on an older home, especially where shade keeps a wall from drying between storms. Near Salmon Creek, here is where it turns up first:
The first boards to take weather on an aging home: corners gone punky near grade, the trim that frames each window and door, water tables, belly bands, and the original sheathing hidden behind them.
Decking gone soft underfoot, the joists and beams under it, and the ledger board bolting the deck back onto the house. On a pressure-treated deck twenty to thirty years old off a subdivision home, that ledger sits in shade and fallen needles and gives way first.
Sill plates, rim joists, studs and post bases, all wicking moisture out of damp earth for years. We find it most in the crawlspaces beneath the lower lots toward the creek, where the ground stays wet.
Flashing that gave up long ago, quietly routing water into the wall storm after storm. In this shade there is rarely enough sun to dry the cavity out.
A drain or a shower pan seeping for months in an original builder bath, soaking the subfloor and framing well before a tile shifts or the floor feels soft.
Snap a photo or two, jot a quick line on what you are seeing, and send it in. Get it to us before 5pm and the answer comes back that day. If it turns out to be a job better left to another trade, we will point you there instead.
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. This pair comes from one of our rot repairs: the shower bay as we found it with water-stained framing, and the finished walk-in shower that replaced it.
Before After What you can see on the outside is the tail of the problem, not the head of it. Rot runs along the grain under the paint and behind the siding, so the stain or the soft spot you can press with a thumb marks where it finally stopped, not where it began. On a north wall held in fir and cedar shade that never really dries, those two points can sit a long way apart. Price that off a photo and you are pricing a guess, and the guess becomes a change order the morning the wall comes open.
That is why we show up and put our hands on it. There is a hard line between what can be confirmed while the wall is still shut and what only an open wall will tell us, and the estimate reads the same way: confirmed work priced firm, the rest set on its own line for you to sign off before any cutting starts. Which number is solid and which is not is never left to guesswork, because the page spells it out.
Most of Salmon Creek went up in the 1980s and 1990s, and builder-grade trim from that era was never meant to last forever. Thirty or forty years in, the same joints and caulk lines that looked fine at the final walkthrough are starting to let water through.
Taking the bad wood out is the simple half. The half that matters is picking material that will not give out in that same corner ten winters from now.
The first move is to blend new wood into what is already there, because a repair you can pick out later is a poor one. On a 1990s subdivision home still carrying its original cedar corner boards, cedar goes back, milled to the same profile. Where that profile has been out of production for years, we shape one up from plain stock until its face and reveal line up with the runs beside it.
Cedar and redwood hold up thanks to the oils locked in the heartwood, though the sapwood in boards sold today is far softer than the old growth it stands in for. Primed finger-jointed pine is the budget pick and takes paint nicely, but it turns punky fast wherever it stays damp, which here is most of the calendar, so we keep it well off the ground and off the foot of a trim run. Cellular PVC and fiber cement do not rot at all, which makes them the smart answer at the details that keep failing, the base of a corner board, a water table, the casing beneath a window that was hung without head flashing. They run more per foot and save you a third visit to the same spot.
Framing calls for a separate judgment. Any member that lands on concrete or sits low near the dirt goes back in pressure-treated, because untreated fir held tight against wet masonry is precisely what let the original plate rot out. A sistered joist or a replacement stud is Douglas fir, cut and nailed so it carries the same weight the failed one did, never just enough to span the opening.
Hardware is easy to underrate. Pressure-treated lumber made now carries enough copper to corrode plain galvanized steel in a hurry, so the screws and nails we send into treated stock or cedar are either stainless or hot-dipped galvanized. Run a bare steel screw into cedar and within one wet season rusty streaks start bleeding down the board, and after that no paint will ever cover them.
Nothing gets fastened up until it has been primed on every face, cut ends and all. Bare end grain wicks moisture in the way a sponge does, and that one habit, carried out or quietly skipped, tells you more about how many years a repair will last than the label on whatever paint goes over it.
Four things decide how big a rot repair becomes. The first two are yours to check in a spare hour, with nothing but a screwdriver.
Does it carry weight? A run of trim, a belly band, the lowest lap of siding, those hold nothing up, so a bad one costs you an afternoon and no more. The answer flips once a bearing member is involved: a sill plate down on the foundation, the rim joist around the floor, a post footing, or the ledger a deck hangs from. Those get temporary posts under the load, new wood rated for the job, plus a permit and an inspection. Because Salmon Creek sits in unincorporated Clark County, that permit comes from the county office rather than any city hall, and a long span may need engineered plans with a stamp. The lumber is the cheap part. The real work is freeing a loaded member without letting anything drop.
How far does the soft wood reach? Set a screwdriver to the board and press at short intervals until the tip stops going in, then carry on probing a foot or so beyond the last give. Decay travels inside the grain further than any stain or blister lets on, and cutting back only to where the damage shows is the usual reason a repair does not last.
Is epoxy worth it here? Once in a while, and we will tell you so. A consolidant, paired with the right filler, saves a milled piece nobody stocks now, an old window sash, a turned column, a bit of antique casing, so long as decay stays a shallow pocket and has not run through the whole piece. It holds no weight, and it will not spare you from opening a wall. Someone pouring epoxy into a sill plate gone soft is booking your job a second time.
And what sits over it? That is what settles whether the repair lasts. The water found a way in higher up, maybe a kickout left off where a roofline ties into a wall, a gutter that overflows in a downpour, siding tucked down into dirt, a ledger with no flashing capping its top edge. We trace that back and seal it before a single board goes in, noted on that same estimate, since new wood under a leak that still runs only gets paid for twice.
Straight answer: the price tracks how much rot is actually there, and nobody knows the true number until that wall or deck is laid open. Still, a few things are true up front. A tidy, contained fix, say a bit of trim or a few mushy deck boards, lands at the bottom of the range. Bring sills, joists or post footings into it and the figure rises, because any structural piece pulls in shoring and a county inspection behind it. The single biggest factor, though, is how long the leak has been feeding the wood. Where it rains most of the calendar, the least expensive repair is the one you handle now instead of a year on.
Where the money goes usually catches people off guard. The wood itself is the smallest line on a rot invoice. What you are really paying for is labor and access: rigging staging or wrestling a ladder into place, prying the siding out far enough to reach behind the rot, propping a load on posts while the bad member comes out, then closing the wall up so nothing shows. Ten feet of rotten trim tucked under the eaves runs more than double the same ten feet you can reach from the ground, and two little repairs on opposite corners of the house cost more than one bigger patch in one spot.
Roughly in order, the bill leads with labor, then the weatherproofing that makes the fix hold, the house wrap, the flashing, the siding, and the primer and topcoat, with the actual lumber well down the list and the permit and its inspection at the very end, only once structural wood is in play, handled here by Clark County instead of a city hall. Whatever has to be removed and reset lands on its own line, a gutter, a downspout, an exterior light, a length of deck railing, a satellite dish mounted on the eave, so you can see plainly how much is wood and how much is access.
Got a written quote from someone else already? Pass that over as well. For most written quotes, we will either meet the figure or beat it by 10%, and we hand you that commitment on paper.
10%
Attach a snapshot or two showing the damage, plus that estimate. Send it in by 5pm and the reply comes that day.
A rot repair lives mostly on the outside of the house, clear of the rooms you actually use, so it stays one of the easier projects to have going on around you. This is the shape it usually takes.
First we walk the property with you and mark the sections due to come off. From there we settle where the staging, the lumber and the dumpster go, which on a tight subdivision lot can take some figuring. Anything breakable close to that wall we move out of the way first, whether you handle it or we do.
Expect the loud day here. We strip siding and trim off over the morning, and the wall is open to view by early afternoon. Those exposed hours are what settle whether the maybe column on your estimate ever comes into play.
Should the open wall show more than we priced for, you hear from us the same day, photos in hand, before anyone makes another cut. Not one item on the maybe line proceeds until you have said go.
The replacement framing and sheathing get nailed up, and we lay the house wrap and flashing on before knocking off that same day, so a raw opening is never left to sit through a rainy night. Should the weather turn before we are buttoned up, we cover the gap with sheeting, tape the seams, and leave it watertight until it passes.
The siding goes back on, the trim after it, and then sealant followed by a first coat of primer. From the sidewalk the place already looks finished, and this is usually when a neighbor drifts over wanting to know who we are.
The finish coat is the last thing on, then the yard gets a thorough sweep and we go round the job with you, matching it to the estimate one line at a time. The cutoffs, the rotted wood we tore out and the dumpster all go with us when we leave.
Press on it. Sound wood pushes back against a screwdriver or even a key; wood that is rotting lets the tip sink in, feels soft, and often crumbles away damp, with the paint over it blistering in patches before anything else shows. If the tip slides in with next to no effort, what is under the paint is already spent. Send a photo and a quick note on what you are seeing, and anything that reaches us before 5pm gets a reply the same day.
Sometimes that really is all of it, and when it is, we will tell you so. But if the soft wood keeps going past the piece you pointed out, we will not skin fresh siding over it and call the job done. Rot does not stop because it is covered. It keeps working through the wood behind the patch, and coming back to redo it costs more than handling it properly the first time around.
We see it often enough that we build it into the quote instead of springing it on you partway through. The work we can confirm from the outside is priced on its own, and whatever an open wall might turn up is set down on a separate line with its own figure. None of that second part starts until you have looked at the photos and told us to carry on.
That is a question for your insurance carrier, since it hinges on how your particular policy is written and on what let the moisture in. A contractor cannot settle it for you. What we can promise is a thorough paper trail: we shoot photos and jot notes on every bit of damage the moment it is exposed, so should you choose to file, the adjuster sees documented findings instead of a secondhand account.
We handle that side of it whenever a job requires it. Rebuilding load-bearing framing, or the support path under a deck, is work the county wants permitted. Since Salmon Creek sits outside any city, there is no municipal building counter here, so the paperwork and inspections run through the Clark County permit center, and a long clear span may call for stamped engineering. Our Washington license, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC, lets us file the application and set the inspection dates for you. A straightforward siding or trim swap, with nothing structural behind it, generally needs no permit.
A repair held to trim or a stretch of siding usually wraps in a day, now and then two. Structural work takes more time, because propping the load, getting the inspection, and sealing the opening back up have to happen in that order, and a finish coat will not set in damp air. The estimate gives you a day count. You are free to come and go through most of the job; the one day worth being reachable is when we open the wall, because the choice about what it was concealing may land on you that day.
Nearly every time. Shingle courses, bevel siding and the common casings are either stocked or run to order on a mill, and when a profile is well and truly out of production, we build one up from solid stock until its face and shadow line match the runs on either side. Color is the simpler half. A saved can or the paint code and it goes quickly; with both long gone, we take a flake off the siding and match to that.
Dry months are the kinder choice, late June to September roughly, mostly because the wall spends less time standing open then. We do not wait for them, though. These repairs go on in every month, and we close each section back up against the weather as that section is done, not in one scramble at the finish. Postponing until it dries out tends to cost you, because the leak carries on the entire time and today’s small soft patch is tomorrow’s big one.
Our shop is at 505 SE 184th Avenue in east Vancouver, a quick run over to Salmon Creek on the Washington side, I-205 to I-5 with no river to cross, so we are on a job here and back home without losing half a day to traffic. We cover the whole community, from the aging subdivisions on the curving streets and the lower lots down near the creek and the greenway, over to the larger custom and bluff homes in Felida, and across toward Mount Vista, Pleasant Valley, Sherwood and the edges by Hazel Dell and Lake Shore. Salmon Creek is unincorporated, so the permit work runs through Clark County. Licensed in Washington, WA Lic. #EVERGRS757MC.
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
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%.
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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Same day response on anything sent before 5pm.
