Also AvailableASK US ABOUT THE REST.Seismic retrofit, radon mitigation, roofing, and property maintenance are all work we take on. They appear here as a list rather than as their own pages because we would rather point you at what we are actually known for. If one of them is what you need, call and ask. If somebody who does only that would serve you better, we will say so.
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Not sure which one you need?
Most projects cross two or three of these. Describe what you want to change and we will tell you what it actually is.
Licensed, bonded, and insured in Oregon. CCB 174033.
Waterproofing
WHAT GOES IN BEFORE TILE.
Everything that matters in a bathroom happens before the tile. The shower pan assembly, the membrane, the way waterproofing turns up the wall and laps at the curb: that is the job. Tile is a finish applied to it. A beautifully tiled shower over a badly built pan will fail, and it will fail inside a wall where nobody sees it until the ceiling below says so.
Ventilation
GETTING THE MOISTURE OUT.
In this climate a bathroom fan is not a comfort item. It needs sizing for the room, ducting in insulated pipe with as few bends as possible, and termination outside the building rather than into an attic or a soffit. A fan venting into a cold attic is how you grow mould in a roof. We check the termination on every bathroom we touch, including ones we are not otherwise rebuilding.
Primary Suites
BIGGER BATHS.
A primary bath usually takes its space from somewhere else: a closet, a hallway, an adjacent bedroom. That makes it a layout project as much as a bathroom one. Freestanding tubs need floor structure verified and a filler routed to them. Curbless showers need the floor dropped or the room raised. Both are ordinary once planned and expensive once retrofitted into a design that did not allow for them.
Hall baths and powder rooms in older Portland houses are small, and the honest constraint is that moving a wall usually costs more than the room gains. Most of what makes a small bath work is fixture selection, door swing, lighting, and where storage goes. We would rather spend the budget on a properly waterproofed shower and good ventilation than on two extra feet nobody notices.
Accessibility
AGEING IN PLACE.
If a wall is open, put blocking in it. Solid backing for grab bars costs almost nothing during a remodel and is disruptive to add later. The same logic applies to door width and to a curbless entry: doing it now is a detail, doing it in fifteen years is a renovation. We raise it on every bathroom regardless of the owner's age, because the cost of being wrong is asymmetric.
Frequently Asked
BATHROOM REMODELING, ANSWERED.
How long does a bathroom remodel take?A straightforward bathroom is measured in weeks rather than months, but tile and fixture lead times set the real calendar. Waterproofing and its inspection are not stages to compress, so a schedule that looks tight is usually one that has skipped something.Can you do a curbless shower on a second floor?Often yes. It means dropping the floor structure in that bay or building the rest of the room up, and which is possible depends on the joists and what runs through them. Answer it during design, because retrofitting it into a fixed plan is where it gets expensive.Why do Portland bathrooms get mould?Almost always ventilation. An undersized fan, a long flexible duct full of bends, or a termination into the attic instead of outside. The moisture has to leave the building. If it does not it condenses somewhere colder, and the problem you see on the ceiling started in the duct.
Related Work
BATHROOMS ACROSS THE METRO
TIGARDBath remodels in Tigard and the surrounding Washington County suburbs.
BATHROOM PORTFOLIOFinished bathrooms, including the waterproofing you cannot see.
