House Restumping in Melbourne — Full & Partial Restumps

How to tell your stumps are failing

Stump problems rarely announce themselves all at once. They creep up over a few seasons, and the house usually gives you clues long before anything is dangerous. Look out for:

• Floors that slope or dip, often worst near the middle of the house or along one external wall.
• Doors that drag or swing shut on their own, and windows that suddenly bind in their frames.
• Diagonal cracks in plaster above door frames and window corners, or cornices pulling away from the ceiling.
• Skirting boards lifting off the floor, leaving a gap you can slide a coin into.
• A springy or hollow feel underfoot, particularly in hallways and kitchens that carry the most traffic.
• Stumps you can see leaning, crumbling or sitting in water when you look through a vent or the subfloor hatch.

Any one of these can have another cause, such as a plumbing leak or a settling roof frame. Several of them together almost always lead back to the subfloor.

Why Melbourne homes move

Melbourne is a city built on stumps and clay. Through the inner north, in Brunswick, Coburg, Northcote and Thornbury, many weatherboards were built between about 1900 and the 1930s on red gum stumps. Red gum is tough, but after a century in the ground it softens, rots at the ground line and settles unevenly. Across the eastern and south-eastern suburbs, from Box Hill and Blackburn out to Ringwood and Croydon and down through Bentleigh, Moorabbin and Cheltenham, the post-war building boom produced streets of weatherboard and brick-veneer homes on timber or early concrete stumps that are now well past their best.

Underneath much of the north, west and south-east is reactive clay. It swells after a wet winter and shrinks back through a dry summer, and every cycle nudges stumps up and down. Homes in the Dandenong Ranges foothills, such as Boronia, Ferntree Gully and Upwey, add sloping blocks and heavy rainfall to the mix, while sandier ground around Mentone, Frankston and the Mornington Peninsula brings its own drainage and settlement issues.

Full restump or partial?

A full restump replaces every stump in the house. A partial restump replaces only the ones that have failed, usually in one zone such as a wet laundry corner, a section near a leaking downpipe or the rear extension. A partial job makes sense when the rest of the stumps are sound and the problem has a clear local cause.

Where a house is still on its original timber stumps throughout, a partial restump tends to fix one area while the next one starts to drop. In that case a full restump is usually the better long-term spend. We make that call after we have been under the floor, and we explain the reasoning so you can weigh it up yourself.

Choosing concrete or steel

Reinforced concrete stumps are the standard replacement for most Melbourne homes. They are strong, they do not rot, and they suit the majority of sites.

Adjustable galvanised steel stumps have a threaded head that can be raised or lowered after installation. That adjustability is useful on reactive clay where some seasonal movement is likely, on homes with uneven ground, or where the owner wants the option of fine-tuning the floor in future without digging anything up. Which suits your house depends on the soil, the subfloor height and the structure above, so we recommend one after the inspection rather than before.

What happens on a restumping job

The steps on a typical job run like this:

• Inspection and scope. Level readings, a stump-by-stump check and a written scope of works.
• Permit. A registered building surveyor issues the building permit, with any engineering they require.
• Propping. The house is supported on temporary props and jacks so the old stumps can be removed safely.
• Excavation and footings. Old stumps come out, new holes are dug and footings are prepared to the specified depth.
• Footing inspection. The surveyor or their inspector checks the footings before anything is concealed.
• New stumps and lowering. New stumps are set, the house is lowered onto them and packed to level.
• Repairs and clean-up. Bearers, joists and packing are fixed as needed and the site is cleared.

Living in the house during a restump

Most owners stay at home throughout. The house remains supported the whole time, and day-to-day life carries on above. There will be noise, the subfloor will be off-limits, and on the day the house is lowered some doors may need adjusting and services may be briefly interrupted. Plaster that has already cracked may move again as the house comes back to level; that is normal and is usually patched once the floor has settled on its new stumps.

Getting a real figure

Restumping costs vary widely from one house to the next, which is why we do not publish a price list. Floor area, the number of failed stumps, crawl-space height, site access, soil type and the condition of the bearers all change the job. An on-site inspection gives a real figure, and it costs you nothing to book one.