Restumping in Bendigo

In the Bendigo area the per-stump rate generally sits around $400 to $700. A modest three-bedroom weatherboard on roughly 50 stumps commonly totals $8,000 to $9,000. A larger or two-storey home running past 100 stumps can exceed $16,000. Those are the numbers worth carrying into a conversation, but a rate alone will not let you compare two quotes, because the count is the other half of the equation and quotes routinely assume different ones. Always ask for the stump count and the rate separately. Two prices $3,000 apart are often two contractors who counted differently, not two contractors with different margins.

The first real variable is subfloor clearance, and it is the one most often left out of a phone quote. Above roughly 600mm a person can work under there with a barrow. Below about 400mm they are dragging spoil out on their stomach, and every stage of the job slows down. The materials cost the same; the labour does not, and labour is the larger part of the bill. This is why an inner-suburb cottage with 50 stumps can genuinely cost more than a larger house in Kangaroo Flat with the same count and a metre of room underneath. If a quote arrives without anyone having looked under the floor, the clearance assumption inside it is a guess.

The second is what the ground turns out to be. Footing holes have to reach material that will actually carry load, and in the historically mined parts of Bendigo that can mean going deeper than standard through disturbed ground or old fill. Reactive clay adds its own requirement for depth. Neither is exotic and neither should derail a job, but both are reasons a fixed price quoted sight-unseen tends to move once work starts.

The third is what else is found once the floor is open. Bearers that have rotted where they sit on the stump, joist ends gone at their bearing points, or subfloor drainage that caused the failure in the first place — these are common on houses old enough to need restumping, and they are separate line items. A good quote flags them as provisional before starting rather than presenting them as a surprise afterwards. Add to that the building permit restumping requires in Victoria, and any plaster patching and repainting after the lift, and you have the full picture. The cheapest quote is frequently the one that has priced the least of it.

Restumping replaces the stumps. Re-levelling lifts a house whose stumps are structurally sound but which has settled, shifted, or had its packing crush, and re-seats it at the right height. If your stumps are in good condition, you may not need them replaced at all — and being sold a full reblock to fix a levelling problem is one of the more expensive mistakes available in this trade, because you are paying for new stumps, footing excavation and concrete you did not require.

What separates them is condition, not symptom. A sloping floor tells you the house is out of level; it tells you nothing about why. Timber stumps rot at ground line, where moisture and air meet, so a stump can look sound at the top and the bottom while the middle has gone — a probe finds that in seconds and a torch never will. Concrete stumps fail differently, cracking or spalling rather than rotting, and often they have not failed at all: they have simply settled into ground that moved, or the packing between the stump head and the bearer has crushed over decades.

The other half of the answer is the level readings. A laser set under the floor, sighting every stump against a fixed datum, produces a map of the actual shape of the floor rather than an impression of it. That map is regularly surprising: the room where a marble rolls is often next to the section that has really moved, because floors slope away from a high point as readily as toward a low one. It also distinguishes a house that has settled evenly — annoying, but often stable — from one with a localised drop that is still progressing.

In practice the outcome is one of three. The stumps are sound and the house needs lifting and re-packing, which is the cheapest of the three and more common than people expect. Some stumps have failed and the rest are fine, which means targeted replacement plus a level. Or the stumps are all of an age and going together, which is when a full reblock is genuinely the right call rather than an upsell. The only way to know which is to get under the house and measure, and that inspection costs a fraction of the difference between the three.

The first is reactive clay. Clay soils take up water and swell, then give it up and shrink, and the more reactive the clay the further it moves. Bendigo's climate makes that cycle pronounced: wet winters load the soil with moisture, then a hot dry summer pulls it back out. A house sitting on that ground rises and falls slightly with the seasons. This is why so many Bendigo homes have doors that bind every winter and free up again by February, and why that pattern on its own is not a reason to restump. Seasonal and reversible is normal. What matters is movement that does not come back — floors sloping further each year, cracks that widen and never close.

Drought cycles make it sharper. An extended dry period shrinks clay further than an ordinary summer does, and the subsequent wet swells it back, so the range of movement over a decade is wider here than in a temperate coastal climate. Mature trees compound it locally: a eucalypt close to a house draws a large volume of water from the soil through summer, concentrating shrinkage in the root zone and producing subsidence at one corner rather than uniform settlement.

The second is the goldfields legacy. Bendigo was worked intensively for gold, and in the historically mined suburbs the ground is not always the undisturbed clay a footing would be designed for — there can be old fill and disturbed material at shallow depth. This is not a reason for alarm and it does not make houses unsafe; it is a reason that footing depth gets established on site rather than copied from a job in the next street, and occasionally a hole goes deeper than standard to reach material that will genuinely carry load.

Together these are why we take levels before quoting and why we are cautious about fixed prices given without anyone looking under the floor. On ground that moves seasonally, a single visit tells you where a house sits today but not whether it is trending. Readings taken now are worth having even if the conclusion is to do nothing — in five years they are the baseline that distinguishes a house which has been quietly dropping from one that has simply been breathing with the weather.