House Reblocking & Restumping in Melbourne's Northern Suburbs

What restumping actually involves

The house is not lifted off the ground in one go. It is taken in sections. Props and bottle jacks go under the bearers to carry the weight while a run of old stumps is dug out. New holes are excavated to the depth set out on the permit drawings, concrete pads are poured at the base, and the new stumps are stood up, plumbed and braced. The building surveyor's inspector checks the holes before anything is backfilled. Once one section is sitting on new stumps, the crew moves along to the next.

When every stump has been replaced, the house comes down onto the new stumps, and packers are set to the level readings recorded at the start. That last stage is where the difference shows inside the house: doors that had been planed to fit start closing on their own again, and a marble placed in the hallway stays where you put it.

Why so many northern suburbs houses need it

The north has two big groups of stump-supported houses. The first is the Edwardian and inter-war stock: weatherboard cottages and Californian bungalows that filled Brunswick, Coburg, Northcote, Thornbury and Preston between roughly 1900 and 1940. Most were stood on red gum or box stumps cut from local timber. Many are still on those original stumps, which means close to a century of wetting and drying at the ground line.

The second group is post-war. After 1945 the paddocks of Reservoir, Fawkner, Glenroy, Pascoe Vale, Broadmeadows and West Heidelberg were filled with weatherboard, brick veneer and concrete-panel houses, many of them built by the Housing Commission. A lot of those went up quickly on whatever timber was available. Seventy-odd years later, a large share of them are ready for new stumps.

Add the ground itself. Much of the north and north-west sits on basalt-derived clay that swells hard in winter and shrinks and cracks in summer. Stumps in that soil are pushed and dropped every year, and it seldom moves every stump by the same amount.

Signs your house is due

• Sloping or rolling floors, especially a dip toward the middle of the house or down one side of the hall.
• Doors and windows that bind in one season and rattle loose in another.
• Cracks over door frames and at cornice joints, often running at an angle.
• Gaps showing under the skirting or below built-in cupboards.
• A springy or hollow feel underfoot in a particular room.
• Stumps that look soft, split or out of plumb when you shine a torch through a subfloor vent.

One sign on its own can have another cause. Three or four together almost always point under the floor.

Whole house or just part of it?

A full restump swaps out every stump under the floor. It makes sense when the house is still on its original timber throughout, because the stumps that look fine today have had the same exposure as the ones that have already failed.

A partial restump replaces a defined group: under a rear extension, a laundry, a section near a leaking downpipe or a corner where a tree has dried the ground out. It suits houses where earlier work has already replaced most stumps, or where the problem is clearly local. We tell you which applies after we have been underneath, and we set out why, so you can make the call yourself.

Permits, engineering and inspections

Restumping in Victoria needs a building permit. Ours are issued by a private building surveyor, and where the house, soil or design calls for it, an engineer sets the footing size and depth. The surveyor inspects the open holes before concrete goes in and signs the job off at the end. You get the paperwork at handover, which matters when you sell, refinance or come to insure.

Houses under a heritage overlay in Merri-bek, Darebin or Banyule may also need a planning check if the work changes the external look, such as altering the height of the floor at the front verandah. In most cases restumping does not, but we confirm it before anything is lodged.

What we look at while the floor is open

Stumps are only one part of the subfloor. During a restump we can see the bearers and joists along their full length, and we report what we find. Common extras in the north include:

• Bearer ends softened where they sat on a damp stump top.
• Joists notched or cut for old plumbing runs.
• Ant caps missing or rusted through.
• Poor subfloor ventilation, often from vents blocked by garden beds or concrete paths poured too high.

Anything outside the quoted scope is priced and agreed with you before it is done.

Getting a price

Every restump is priced from an on-site inspection. Stump count, crawl-space height, side access, ground conditions and the choice between concrete and steel all change the number. Book a free subfloor inspection and we will give you a written scope and quote you can compare against anyone else's.