About

Formwork started in 2009 as two carpenters and a shared truck. Fourteen years later it is fourteen people, one shop in Southeast Portland, and a rule we have not broken yet: the person who scopes your project is the person whose name is on the permit, and the crew that starts your kitchen is the crew that finishes it.

Why one crew, start to finish

Most renovation horror stories are not about bad carpentry. They are about handoffs — the designer who never spoke to the framer, the electrician who showed up before the plumber had finished, the project manager who changed halfway through and inherited someone else’s promises. We keep the same lead carpenter and the same project manager on a job from demo to final walkthrough specifically to remove that failure mode.

What we actually build

Kitchens and bathrooms are most of what we do, because they are most of what breaks in an old Portland house — a 1910s bathroom with no membrane behind the tile, a 1970s kitchen with a layout built around an appliance nobody owns anymore. We also take on additions, finished basements, and whole-home renovations where the small fixes have finally caught up with the house.

The fourteen-year rule

Every lead carpenter at Formwork has framed, tiled, or finished at least thirty homes in this city before we let them run a job alone. Portland’s housing stock is not uniform — balloon framing next to platform framing next to a 1980s addition built to a different code entirely — and there is no substitute for having actually opened that many walls.

We would rather tell you a wall is load-bearing in the estimate than discover it with a sledgehammer.