Your floor dropped overnight in Shepparton: what to do in the first hour.
Keep everyone off that section of floor and move the heavy things, a loaded bookcase, a piano, a full fridge, off it now. Turn the water off at the meter if you can hear water running or the ground under the house is wet. If you can smell gas, turn it off at the meter, open the house up, get outside, and ring the faults and emergencies number printed on your gas bill. Do not jack anything. Do not shovel soil or sand into the gap. Photograph the drop from three fixed positions, measure it with a straight edge and a tape, and write today’s date on the photos.
Triage table: symptom, cause, how urgent, what it costs.
Find the row that matches what you can actually see. The urgency column is the honest one: only three of these need someone out the same day, and the rest are cheaper and better handled with a proper inspection and two or three written quotes.
| What you can see or hear | What it usually means | Urgency | Typical 2026 cost to put right |
|---|---|---|---|
| Floor has dropped 20 mm or more in one spot within days, plaster cracked above it | A stump has punched through its footing pad, snapped at ground line, or the bearer end above it has rotted through | Now | $600 - $1,800 to prop, then $1,500 - $6,000 for the failed stumps and bearer end |
| Smell of gas under or around the house after the movement | A copper gas line under the floor has been pulled or strained as the floor dropped | Now | The distributor attends a suspected leak at no charge; plumber repair $400 - $1,200 |
| Burning smell, flickering lights or a warm switch after the floor moved | Subfloor wiring pulled tight or chafed where it crosses a bearer | Now | Electrician attendance $250 - $600, rerun of a damaged cable from about $400 |
| Floor is spongy near the bathroom, laundry or kitchen, with a musty smell | A long-running leak has rotted joists, bearer ends and the stumps underneath them | This week | Leak detection $300 - $650, bearer and joist work $80 - $180 per lineal metre, typically $1,800 - $5,000 |
| Soil washed away around a stump, water pooling under the house after rain | Stormwater, a downpipe discharging under the floor, or a broken drain is undermining the footings | This week | Downpipe and drain fix $400 - $1,500, subfloor drainage $2,000 - $6,000 |
| New stair-step cracking through brickwork, 5 mm or wider, doors jamming shut | Footing settlement on reactive clay, often needing underpinning rather than restumping | This week | Structural engineer report $700 - $1,800, underpinning $1,500 - $3,500 per pier |
| One row of floor bounces, a gap opening between skirting and floorboards | A line of perished timber stumps under one bearer, common in pre-1980 weatherboards | This week | Partial restump of the failed rows $4,500 - $9,000 |
| Whole floor slopes gently, doors stick every summer and free up in winter | Seasonal shrink and swell of reactive Goulburn Valley clay, not a failed stump | Can wait | Monitor for a full season first, then $3,500 - $8,000 for levelling if it does not come back |
| Front verandah or back step pulling away from the house wall | The verandah has its own shallow footings and is moving, usually independent of the house | Can wait | $800 - $2,500 to re-stump or re-pier the verandah alone |
| Hairline cracks in cornices only, floor still reads level | Normal seasonal movement or plaster shrinkage, no structural loss | Can wait | $0 now. Patch it when you next paint, about $300 - $900 for a room |
Figures are realistic Shepparton and Goulburn Valley ranges for 2026, before any difficult-access loading. The full rate card is on the pricing page.
Five things that make it measurably worse in the next 24 hours.
- Jacking it yourself. A bottle jack under a bearer puts several tonnes through one small point. On timber that has already rotted it punches straight through, and on sound timber it splits along the grain. Houses also have to be lifted slowly, a few millimetres a day, so the plaster and the brickwork travel with the frame. A fast lift can buy you a $2,000 to $4,000 plastering bill on top of the stump work.
- Filling the void with soil or sand. It feels like support and it is not. Loose fill compacts under load within weeks, and it holds water hard against the timber, which is exactly what rotted the original stump. It also hides the evidence an engineer or an insurance assessor needs to see.
- Hosing or pressure washing under the house. Wet clay under a footing loses bearing capacity quickly. If you are trying to see what is going on down there, use a torch, not water.
- Leaving the water on when a service is leaking. This is the single fastest way to turn a one-stump problem into a five-stump problem. A weeping cold water line under a Mooroopna weatherboard can wash out the bedding under two or three footings inside a week.
- Loading the floor back up. A full fridge is roughly 120 kg, a loaded bookcase can be 200 kg, a slate pool table is well over 300 kg. Take that weight off the affected bay and leave it off until the floor is propped.
What to turn off, and in what order.
Water. Go to the meter at the front boundary and watch the smallest dial for two minutes with every tap in the house closed. If it moves, you have a leak on your side of the meter, and on a stumped house that water is very likely running under the floor. Shut the stop tap and ring a plumber in the morning. Leak detection is typically $300 to $650 in this district and it is money well spent, because replacing stumps that sit in a wet hole simply gives you a wet hole with newer stumps in it.
Gas. If you can smell gas, do not switch anything on or off inside the house, including a light switch. Turn the gas off at the meter, open doors and windows, get everyone outside, and ring the faults and emergencies number printed on your gas bill. The distributor attends suspected leaks at no charge. Copper gas lines that run under a suspended timber floor are often clipped to the joists, so a floor that drops 30 mm can put real strain on a fitting.
Power. Only if there is a reason: a burning smell, a warm switch or socket, or a visible cable pulled tight across a bearer. Turn off that circuit at the switchboard rather than the main switch so the fridge and the lights elsewhere keep working, and book a licensed electrician. Never pull, cut or reroute subfloor wiring yourself.
Nothing else. You do not need to turn off the hot water service, drain the pipes or move out. In almost every sudden-drop job we look at around Shepparton, Mooroopna and Kialla, the house stays fully habitable while it waits for a proper inspection.
What you can safely do yourself, and what you should not touch.
Safe to do yourself
- Photograph everything from fixed positions: the same corner of the same room, the outside wall, the crack, a tape measure held against the drop. Repeat in a week. Two dated sets of photos are worth more than any description when an assessor or an engineer arrives.
- Run a long straight edge or a stringline across the floor and measure the fall in millimetres. A 1.8 m level and a tape will do it. Write the number down.
- Mark the ends of any wall crack with a pencil line and the date, so you can tell in a fortnight whether it is still moving.
- Clear the vents. Ground level built up against the wall, a garden bed, mulch or a concrete path over the airbricks is a very common cause in older Shepparton houses, and clearing it costs nothing.
- Redirect the downpipe. If a downpipe discharges beside the wall or under the floor, put a length of flexible pipe on it and run it away from the house today.
Genuinely dangerous, leave it alone
- Crawling into a subfloor where a bearer has failed or the floor is actively moving. The load is looking for a new path down and you do not want to be in it.
- Any jacking, packing or wedging under a bearer or a stump. That includes stacking bricks or timber offcuts under a sagging bearer.
- Removing a damaged stump to have a look. That stump may be the only thing holding that bay up.
- Digging beside a footing, a pier or a brick wall to inspect it. Undermining a footing that is already settling is how a settlement crack becomes a structural failure.
- Entering a subfloor that has been flooded until it has dried and been checked. Wet subfloors around the Goulburn and Broken rivers can hold contaminated silt, and the wiring down there may be compromised.
Send us the photos and the measurement today.
Tell us what changed and when. We read floor levels on site, free of charge, and tell you whether it needs propping now or a written quote next week.
After hours tonight, or Monday morning?
An after-hours structural attendance around Shepparton generally carries a call-out fee of $250 to $450 plus $110 to $160 an hour, and there is a hard limit on what it buys you. Nobody is replacing a stump at 9 pm. What an after-hours visit does is put rated props under the failed bay so the floor cannot drop further overnight. The same propping booked inside normal hours usually sits at the bottom of the $600 to $1,800 range, because there is no premium on the labour and the props come off a scheduled run.
So the real question is not what it costs, it is whether the floor can drop again before morning. It can if there is water actively running under the house, if a bearer end has crushed rather than a single stump failing, or if the drop is still visibly moving hour to hour. It cannot, in almost every other case, because a failed stump usually settles until the bearer finds new bearing on soil or on the next stump along, and then stops.
What this business does and does not do
We are a restumping, levelling and underpinning contractor working Monday to Friday, and we reply to enquiries within one business day. We do not run a 24 hour call-out desk, and we would rather tell you that plainly than take a booking we cannot honour at midnight. If there is gas, live wiring, or a genuine collapse risk right now, that is a job for the emergency services and your utility distributor, not for a restumper. If it is a dropped floor with no services involved, send the photos tonight and we will look at it in daylight.
Three situations where waiting genuinely saves you money.
A slope that has been there for years. If your doors have been sticking every January and freeing up every July, that is reactive clay doing what reactive clay does. Much of Shepparton, Mooroopna and Kialla sits on moderately to highly reactive soil, classified Class M to Class H under AS 2870, and the ground genuinely rises and falls between a dry summer and a wet winter. Get it inspected, but do not pay a premium to have it looked at on a Sunday.
Cracks that are not moving. Pencil the ends and the date. If they have not grown in a fortnight, you have time to collect two or three written quotes on what is likely to be a $12,000 to $22,000 job. Rushing a decision that size to save a week is the most expensive thing you can do on this page.
A house you are about to sell. Movement discovered a fortnight before auction feels like an emergency and is not. A restump takes one to two weeks on site plus permit lead time, so it will not be finished before the campaign anyway. There is a real decision to make between fixing and disclosing, and it is worth making it calmly. It is covered in detail on our pre-sale subfloor guide and on whether restumping adds value before selling.
Where waiting does cost you: anything involving water. A leaking service, a blocked stormwater line or a downpipe running under the floor will keep working on the ground under your footings every day you leave it. That part is worth fixing this week whatever else you decide, and it is usually the cheapest line on the whole job.
What happens when we come out.
We get under the house with a light and a probe and check every stump, not just the one that failed. Rotted red gum rarely fails alone: if one has gone at ground line after 50 or 60 years in Goulburn Valley clay, the ones either side of it are usually within a few years of the same thing. We read the floor with a laser level and record the fall room by room, look at the bearers and joists for rot and borer, check the ant caps, and look hard at where water is getting in. Then you get a written, itemised, fixed-price quote covering the stumps, the re-levelling, the building permit and the engineer’s footing computations.
If the answer is that only three stumps need doing, that is what the quote says. Partial restumps are a legitimate repair on a house whose remaining stumps are sound, and they sit in the $4,500 to $9,000 range rather than the $12,000 to $22,000 of a full one. What we will not do is quote a full restump on a house that does not need one. If you want to sanity check any quote you receive, including ours, our guide on how to choose a restumper lists exactly what should be itemised, and the restumping cost guide explains what moves the price. If the diagnosis turns out to be footing settlement rather than stump failure, the fix is underpinning, which is a different job at a different price. Landlords and property managers dealing with a sudden drop in a tenanted house should also read our landlord obligations guide, because the clock on an urgent repair starts the day the renter tells you.
Questions people ask at 10 pm
My floor dropped overnight. Is that an emergency?
What should I turn off first?
Can I jack the floor up myself to stop it dropping further?
What does an after-hours call-out cost compared with waiting until Monday?
How fast does a failed stump get worse?
Do I need a building permit even for emergency stump work?
Send us the photos of the drop and we will tell you what it needs
Describe the straight-edge measurement and we will book a free subfloor inspection, usually within a few working days, then send a fixed-price written quote.
Not sure whether it is stumps, bearers or the footing?
That is the whole point of the free inspection. We read the levels, find the water, and tell you which of the three it actually is before anyone quotes a dollar.