Make Your Stumps Last Twice as Long: Shepparton Schedule

Print it and stick it in the shed

The maintenance checklist, grouped by how often.

Every item is tagged as either a job you can do yourself or one worth paying someone for. Tick as you go, the page remembers your ticks on this device, and the print button gives you a clean copy without the website around it.

After every storm or heavy rain, about 15 minutes

DIY Walk the perimeter and check every downpipe is still connected and discharging at least 2 m from the wall.
DIY Look for water still pooling against the house 24 hours after the rain stopped. Anything still sitting there is a drainage problem, not a wet week.
DIY Clear leaf litter, silt and grass clippings off every subfloor vent.
DIY Shine a torch through a vent and look for standing water or shining wet soil under the floor.
DIY Check the gutters and the overflow line. A blocked gutter dumps an entire roof of water against one footing.
Get a pro After a flood, do not enter the subfloor until it has dried and the wiring has been checked. Photograph the water height and keep the date.

Every season, four times a year, about 30 minutes

DIY Pull mulch, garden beds, stacked firewood and rubbish back from every airbrick so air can move right through the subfloor.
DIY Check ground clearance. Soil, mulch and paving should sit at least 150 mm below the underside of the timber.
DIY Water meter test: every tap off, watch the smallest dial for two minutes. If it moves, you have a leak on your side of the meter.
DIY Open the crawl space hatch and smell it. Musty means damp, and damp is what rots stumps.
DIY Check the hot water service overflow and the air conditioner condensate discharge are piped away from the house, not into the bed against the wall.
DIY Reposition any sprinkler or dripper that wets the ground within a metre of the wall. Uneven moisture is worse for clay than uniformly wet or uniformly dry.
DIY In summer look for shrinkage gaps opening between the soil and the wall. In winter look for the ground closing back up. Note which corners move most.

Every year, one afternoon plus one trade visit

Get a pro Book a termite inspection to AS 3660, typically $300 to $450 around Shepparton. Ant caps slow termites down, they do not stop them.
DIY Go under with a torch, or send a phone on a stick through a vent, and photograph every stump line. Date the photos so next year is a comparison.
DIY Probe the base of every stump you can safely reach with a screwdriver. Soft timber at ground line means the clock is running on that stump.
DIY Check the ant caps are still there, still flat, and not bridged by soil, mulch or a new concrete path.
DIY Read the floor. Run a long level or a marble across each room and write the fall down in millimetres, room by room, with the date.
DIY Check door and window reveals. Even gaps all the way around mean a stable house. Tapered gaps mean something has moved.
DIY Clear the stormwater pits and check the grates. Silt build-up in Goulburn Valley stormwater is normal and it backs water up under houses.
DIY Check every packer and shim under a bearer is still tight. A loose packer you can slide out by hand means the load has shifted off it.

Every three to five years

Get a pro Book a free subfloor inspection and a laser floor level read, so you have a professional baseline to compare against later.
Get a pro On a house over 40 years old, have the stormwater and sewer lines camera checked, typically $300 to $900. Old earthenware lines crack and leak quietly for years.
Get a pro If the crawl space still smells damp after you have cleared everything, have the ventilation upgraded, $250 to $900.
Get a pro Before removing any large tree near the house, get an arborist and, on a reactive site, an engineer. Removing a big tree can heave a clay site as much as planting one shrank it.
DIY Review the building file: permits, engineer’s computations, certificates of final inspection, invoices. Missing documents cost you money at sale.

Know your enemy

What actually eats stumps in the Goulburn Valley.

Reactive clay. Shepparton, Mooroopna, Kialla and most of the surrounding flats sit on heavy clay laid down by the Goulburn and Broken rivers, typically classified Class M to Class H under AS 2870. It swells when it is wet and shrinks when it dries out, and this district gives it plenty of reason to do both: roughly 480 mm of rain a year concentrated in winter and spring, followed by summers that regularly run above 35 degrees. Footings founded in the active zone of that clay ride up and down with the seasons. That is the movement people describe as doors sticking in January and freeing up in July.

Water in the wrong place. Uniform moisture is not the enemy, uneven moisture is. A downpipe pouring against one corner, a leaking service under the bathroom, a garden bed that gets watered daily on the north side, or an irrigation line running past the house all keep one part of the clay wet while the rest of it dries. The house then twists rather than moving as one, and twisting is what cracks cornices and jams doors. In irrigation country this is worth thinking about, because a channel, a leaking garden line or a laser-levelled paddock next door can hold the water table up on one side of a block.

Trees. A mature eucalypt, elm, liquidambar or peppercorn will pull a very large volume of moisture out of clay through a dry summer, and older Shepparton streets are full of them. The common rule of thumb is to keep new plantings of thirsty species at least their expected mature height away from the footings. Removing one is not automatically the answer either: take out a big established tree and the clay rehydrates over the following years and can heave the corner back up, which is its own kind of damage.

Blocked ventilation. A suspended timber floor needs air moving right through the subfloor, and the National Construction Code sets a minimum free opening area per metre of external wall for that purpose. Every retrofit works against it: a raised garden bed, a concrete path poured level with the airbricks, a pergola slab, decking, or firewood stacked along the wall. Damp, still air under a floor is the exact condition timber rot needs, and it is also what termites are looking for.

Termites. Northern Victoria is termite country. Ant caps on stumps are a detection aid, not a barrier: they force termites to build a visible mud lead around the cap instead of travelling up inside the timber. That only works if somebody looks. An annual inspection to AS 3660 costs $300 to $450 and is the cheapest structural insurance you can buy on an old weatherboard.

Flood. This is a real and recent factor here rather than a theoretical one. Water through a subfloor leaves silt over the vents, saturates bearers and joists, washes the bedding out from around footings, and can leave stumps standing in soft ground for months. If your house has been through inundation, the subfloor deserves a proper look even if the floor reads level, because the damage from a flood often shows up one to two summers later.

What you should expect

Service life, and what neglect costs.

Component	Service life in this district	What shortens it	Cost when it fails
Hardwood or red gum stumps	40 to 70 years	Damp ground at the base, blocked vents, buried ant caps, termites	$4,500 - $22,000 depending on how many
Concrete stumps	60 to 100 years and beyond	Shallow founding on reactive clay, impact damage, exposed reinforcement	$60 - $110 per stump to replace
Galvanised steel adjustable stumps	50 years and up while the coating is intact	Cut or drilled galvanising, soil banked over the base plate, standing water	$90 - $160 per stump to replace
Bearers and joists	Life of the house if kept dry	Plumbing leaks, poor ventilation, flood inundation, borer	$80 - $180 per lineal metre
Subfloor ventilation	Needs checking every season	Garden beds, paving, decking, mulch, stored firewood	$250 - $900 to clear and add vents
Ant caps	Life of the stump if not bridged	Soil or concrete built up over them, crushed caps, renovation work	Termite damage repairs from $1,800 up

Indicative Shepparton and Goulburn Valley figures for 2026. Full rates on the pricing page.

The arithmetic of neglect

Four cheap jobs, and what they turn into.

Blocked subfloor vents. Clearing them and adding a few more is $250 to $900. Left for a decade under a Shepparton weatherboard, the constant damp rots stumps at ground line and rots the bearer ends above them, which is a $4,500 to $9,000 partial restump plus $1,800 to $5,000 of timber. That is a job that grew by a factor of twenty for want of an afternoon with a shovel.
A downpipe discharging beside the wall. Redirecting it properly, with a pipe run out to the stormwater, is $400 to $1,500. Left alone, it washes the bedding out from under two or three footings and drops that corner, and the repair with propping is $1,500 to $6,000.
A slow plumbing leak. Detection is $300 to $650 and the repair $400 to $1,500. Two years of it under a bathroom takes out joists, a bearer and the stumps under them, and now you are at $1,800 to $5,000 in timber before anyone has touched a stump.
Ignoring a tree. An arborist opinion is a couple of hundred dollars. A mature tree drying out clay against a brick footing over several summers is what puts people into underpinning, at $1,500 to $3,500 per pier, and most jobs need piers along a whole wall.

None of that requires special skills. The four seasonal jobs at the top of the checklist, vents, ground clearance, downpipes and the water meter test, take half an hour and cost nothing. If you want to understand which of these your house has already got, our page on the signs you need restumping works through the symptoms, and the DIY versus professional guide is honest about where the line sits between maintenance you should do and structural work you should not.

Warranties

What voids a warranty on new stumps.

Galvanised steel. The protection is the coating, so anything that breaches it matters. Cutting, drilling or welding a stump after manufacture without properly recoating the bare steel is the classic one, and it is usually done on site to make something fit. Soil, mulch or concrete banked up over the base plate holds moisture against the most vulnerable part of the assembly. Using a stump outside the load range or the height range it was made for will also void it, as will contact with incompatible metals or chemically aggressive fill. Read what the manufacturer says about installation, because the warranty is written against those instructions.

Concrete. Concrete stumps are far more forgiving, and the failures we see are installation issues rather than product issues: founded too shallow for the soil class, set on inadequate pads, or damaged during backfilling so the reinforcement is exposed. Once a stump is in and the footing is right, there is very little you can do to it from the surface.

The installer’s workmanship warranty. This is the one that matters most to a homeowner, and the exclusions are consistent across the trade. Movement caused by a leak you did not repair. Ventilation you were told to keep clear and then covered with a deck or a garden bed. Any DIY jacking, packing or shimming after the job. A large tree planted near the footings afterwards. Additional load, such as a slate floor or a heavy extension tied into the existing structure. On top of any contract warranty, domestic building work in Victoria carries statutory warranties, and building actions can generally be brought within 10 years of the certificate of final inspection, which is one more reason to keep that certificate in the house file.

The honest limit of maintenance

You cannot maintain your way out of stumps that have reached the end of their life. Timber is a consumable component of an old house, like a roof or a hot water service, and the schedule on this page moves you to the top of the 40 to 70 year band rather than out of it. We do not sell maintenance contracts and there is nothing on this page you need to pay us for: almost all of it is a torch, a screwdriver and half an hour. When the day does come, doing it in a dry stretch with good access is cheaper than doing it in a wet Goulburn Valley winter, which we cover on the best time of year page.

If a stump has already failed and the floor has dropped, this is not the page you need. Go to the first-hour steps instead. If the house is tenanted, the repair timeframes are set out on our landlord page, and if the damage came from a burst pipe or a storm rather than age, the insurance page covers what is claimable.

Maintenance questions

How long should stumps last in Shepparton?

Hardwood stumps in Goulburn Valley clay generally give 40 to 70 years, concrete stumps 60 to 100 or more, and galvanised steel 50 years and up while the coating stays intact. The spread inside those ranges is almost entirely about water. The same red gum stump lasts 70 years in dry, well-ventilated ground and 35 years with a garden bed against the wall and a downpipe discharging beside it.

What is the single most important maintenance job?

Keeping the ground and the water away from the timber. That means soil, mulch and paving at least 150 mm below the underside of the bearers, every subfloor vent clear, and every downpipe discharging at least 2 m from the wall. It costs nothing but half an hour four times a year, and clearing blocked ventilation professionally is only $250 to $900. Left alone for a decade it turns into a $4,500 to $9,000 partial restump.

How often should I get under the house?

Once a year with a torch and a screwdriver, and after any flood or major storm. Probe the base of the stumps you can reach: soft timber at ground line means the clock is running. Photograph each stump line and date the photos so you can compare year to year. Book a termite inspection annually as well, which runs $300 to $450 around Shepparton, because this is termite country and ant caps only slow them down.

Do trees really cause stump and footing problems?

Yes, and in reactive clay it is one of the biggest single factors. A mature eucalypt, elm or peppercorn draws large volumes of moisture out of the soil through a dry Shepparton summer, shrinking the clay on one side of the house and dropping that corner. Removing a big tree can be just as disruptive, because the clay rehydrates and heaves. Keep new plantings well clear and get an arborist and an engineer involved before removing anything large near the footings.

What voids a warranty on new stumps?

On galvanised steel, cutting, drilling or welding the stump after manufacture without recoating, letting soil bank up over the base plate, and using it outside the load or height range it was made for. On any installation, the usual workmanship exclusions are movement caused by an unrepaired leak, ventilation you were told to keep clear and then blocked, DIY jacking or packing, and a large tree planted near the footings afterwards. In Victoria structural building work also carries statutory warranties, with building actions running to 10 years from the certificate of final inspection.

Can maintenance save me from ever restumping?

No, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Timber stumps are a consumable part of the house with a service life of 40 to 70 years, and good maintenance moves you to the top of that range rather than out of it. What maintenance does is turn a $12,000 to $22,000 job you have to do now into one your house does not need for another 20 years, and it stops the cheap version becoming the expensive version.

Get a price

Get a dated baseline for your subfloor before the next summer

We crawl the subfloor, laser read the floor levels and photograph every stump line, free, and tell you honestly whether anything needs doing yet.

Make your stumps and subfloor last twice as long in Shepparton: the maintenance schedule.