Emergency restumping and urgent propping.

Most restumping is not urgent. Stumps in the Goulburn Valley fail slowly, over years, and a floor that has been gently sloping since 2019 will still be there next month. The jobs that genuinely need someone under the house this week are a smaller and more specific set, and it is worth knowing which one you have before you start ringing around.

A stump has actually collapsed.

You hear it more often than you see it: a crack or a thump, then a section of floor that has visibly dropped 20mm or more overnight and feels alive underfoot. A perished redgum or messmate stump that has been holding on by its outer shell can crush suddenly, and the bearer above it drops onto whatever is next. That is a propping job today, not a conversation for next month.

The floor is moving fast, not slowly.

A slope that appeared over a decade is one thing. A door that closed fine at Christmas and now needs a shoulder, in a Shepparton summer where the clay has been drying hard since November, is another. Rapid movement usually means several stumps have gone at once or the ground under them has lost bearing, and it tends to accelerate rather than settle down on its own.

Water has been through the subfloor.

Flood, a burst mains, a failed hot-water service or years of a leaking gutter dumping against the wall all end up in the same place: a saturated subfloor over reactive clay. The clay swells, the timber softens, and the stumps that were marginal become the stumps that fail. This is the most common urgent call we take in Mooroopna and the lower parts of Shepparton.

Something has hit the house.

A vehicle into a corner, a tree through the verandah in a Goulburn Valley storm, or a fire that has cooked the subfloor timbers. In all three the stumps and bearers can be compromised in ways nothing above floor level shows, and an insurer will want a proper structural assessment before the make-good is scoped.

Shepparton and Mooroopna sit on the Goulburn River floodplain, and the October 2022 event, when the Goulburn peaked around twelve metres at Shepparton, put water through a lot of subfloors that had never seen it. The single most useful thing we can tell you is that a flooded subfloor is a drying problem first and a restumping problem second, if at all.

Concrete stumps generally do not care. Timber stumps that were already three-quarters gone can be finished off by a long soaking. And the reactive clay itself swells hard when saturated, then shrinks back over the following six to twelve months as it dries, which means the floor you measure the week after a flood is not the floor you will have next spring. Restumping into a swollen clay profile and re-levelling to that reading is how you end up with a floor that is out again by the following summer.

The sequence that actually works: get the water out, get air moving through the subfloor, clear and reinstate the vents, deal with any rotted bearers as a subfloor repair, then re-read the levels once the ground has settled to its normal seasonal range. If the stumps have genuinely failed, they will still be failed in six months and you will be restumping to real numbers.

Can you restump a house in an emergency in Shepparton?

Not in a day, and anyone promising a same-day restump is not doing it lawfully. Restumping is building work under the Victorian Building Regulations, so it needs a building permit and an engineer’s footing design to AS 2870 before the first stump comes out, and that paperwork realistically takes one to three weeks. What we can do urgently is make the house safe: temporary props and packing under the failed bearer, usually within a day or two, so the floor stops moving while the permit is arranged. Make-safe is fast, the restump itself is not.

What do you do if a stump collapses under my floor?

We get under the house, find every stump carrying that bearer rather than just the one that failed, and prop the load onto adjustable steel props sitting on spreader plates on firm ground. A collapsed stump is almost never alone: the ones either side have usually carried extra load for years and are close behind it. We then laser-read the floor levels through the whole house so the eventual restump brings the floor back to true instead of locking in the drop.

Does a flood mean my house needs restumping?

Not automatically, and this is where a lot of Goulburn Valley owners get talked into work they do not need. Concrete stumps generally shrug off inundation. Timber stumps that were already perished can be finished off by a long soaking, and saturated reactive clay can heave then shrink as it dries, moving the floor over the following months. After the October 2022 flood the honest answer for many Shepparton and Mooroopna homes was to dry the subfloor out, restore ventilation, and re-read the levels six months later before committing to anything.

Is an emergency restump more expensive than a planned one?

The restump itself costs the same, because it is priced per stump on the same 2026 rates: about $60 to $110 for a concrete stump supplied and installed, or $90 to $160 for a galvanised steel adjustable one. What an emergency adds is the make-safe visit, typically $400 to $1,200 depending on how many props and how bad the access is. That is money spent stopping further damage, and it is credited against the job if we go on to do the restump.

Can I keep living in the house while it is propped?

In most cases yes. Properly installed steel props on spreader plates carry the floor load safely and are a normal part of restumping, which is done with the house occupied and furnished nearly every time. The exceptions are where a bearer has actually broken, where the floor has dropped enough to pull the wall frame, or where a building surveyor has issued an emergency order. We tell you plainly which situation you are in rather than leaving you to guess.