10/03/2026
Featured Friday: Chris and Ashley Lee
LEEs Carpet Cleaning
Sometimes the best businesses aren’t really built around a business plan.
They’re built around a family.
For Chris and Ashley Lee, Lee’s Carpet Cleaning has become part of a much bigger story: finding love when neither necessarily expected it, blending a family, raising 4 boys, working hard, and choosing Wallowa County as the place to do it all.
Chris arrived in Wallowa County at the end of 2004. He had grown up in La Pine, worked at a mill after high school, and later moved to Washington, where he worked in manufacturing and for Cascade Natural Gas.
Carpet cleaning started as a side hustle.
Chris bought his first machine for $5,000 and began cleaning carpets for friends and family while working another job. When he moved to Wallowa County, he decided to give the business a real shot.
The first year taught him an important lesson about entrepreneurship.
“I learned I needed a job,” Chris laughed.
So he did both.
For more than 20 years, Chris has continued building Lee’s Carpet Cleaning while keeping other work on the side. Today, he also works part-time for Hodgins Distributing. It is a work ethic that has become part of the Lee family culture.
Ashley’s road to Wallowa County was different.
Her grandfather, Bob Stoffel of Stoffel Brothers Drilling, lived and worked here, so she spent childhood vacations visiting the county. Some of her strongest early memories are camping in her uncle’s backyard, walking around downtown Enterprise and exploring back roads with her grandfather.
“I got to come and enjoy the county and see what community was really about,” she said.
After graduating high school in Pennsylvania and spending a year at Boise State University, Ashley eventually made Wallowa County home in 2011.
Then a mutual friend named Bobby Rhodes decided Chris and Ashley needed to meet.
They started texting.
There was just one small detail.
Chris was 15 years older.
Ashley was 25. Chris was 41.
That mattered a lot less once they actually met.
Their first meeting was outside the old Video Buffs in Enterprise. Ashley remembers standing there talking with Chris and feeling as though the rest of the world simply disappeared.
They both knew.
Within about 2 months, they were engaged. They married the following July and have now been married 13 years.
Both came into the relationship with a son, just 6 months apart in age. They later had 2 more boys together.
Today their sons are Robert, 17; Camden, 16; Cooper, 12; and Reagan, 10.
Ashley said one of the lessons their family has taught her is that life keeps offering new chapters.
“Life is cyclical,” she said. “You look at seasons, you look at creatures. There’s always another chapter.”
That includes marriage itself.
“Even though we’ve been married this long, I feel like we’re still in different chapters than when we first met. Even in our own marriage, we’re closing certain chapters to open different chapters in our life.”
One constant has been work.
Ashley began helping Chris with the carpet business early in their relationship and became fully involved around 2015–2016. Over the years, Lee’s Carpet Cleaning expanded beyond carpets into upholstery, window cleaning, construction cleaning, move-in and move-out cleaning, and commercial work.
There have also been plenty of side jobs along the way.
For the Lees, that isn’t something to apologize for. It’s part of providing for a family.
Four growing boys, after all, have an impressive ability to turn groceries into empty refrigerators.
That work ethic is showing up in the next generation. Their older boys are already exploring ranch work, mechanics, lawn care and their own entrepreneurial ideas.
But Chris and Ashley want their sons to learn something beyond simply working hard.
They want them to become strong men who are also kind.
“I hope I give them the backbone to stand up for what they believe in,” Ashley said. “I’m hoping I can raise them to be gentle enough to be perceived as who they are, but also have the strong will enough to stand up for who they are.”
For them, Wallowa County is an ideal place to do that.
It offers something they believe is increasingly rare: accountability mixed with genuine support.
If their boys do something good, somebody notices. If they get out of line, there’s a pretty good chance somebody notices that too.
But the deeper side of community became especially clear when Ashley underwent brain surgery. Their family received roughly 30 days of meals, some from people Ashley didn’t even know.
“That’s why we live here,” she said. “That’s why we stay here.”
Chris and Ashley are now beginning another chapter with Wallowa Valley Ventures, a locally based short-term rental management business they hope to grow alongside Lee’s Carpet Cleaning.
Whatever direction it takes, their measure of success seems pretty simple.
Build something worthwhile.
Take care of your family. Work hard. Stay open to the next chapter.
And when you find someone you love enough to build that life with, don’t let a number on a birth certificate scare you away.
