Walk the streets west of Sydney Road and you will pass hundreds of them: weatherboard houses with a front verandah, a hipped or gabled roof and a hallway running straight down the middle. Most went up between about 1918 and 1940. A surprising number still sit on the timber they were built on.

What these houses were built on

Builders of the period stood houses on hardwood stumps, often red gum or grey box, cut locally and set straight into the ground or onto a flat stone. There were no concrete pads, and little thought was given to ventilation or drainage. Ant caps came later.

Good hardwood lasts a long time, but not indefinitely. The weak point is the ground line, where timber is wet for half the year and dry for the other half. Rot sets in there first, then works inward. A stump can look solid above ground while the base has been reduced to a pencil-thin core.

How the house tells you

On an inter-war weatherboard, the first sign is often the hallway. Because the central stumps carry the weight of internal walls and the roof structure, they tend to drop first. The floor dips toward the middle and the house develops a shallow saucer shape.

Next come the doors. Internal doors in these houses are usually tall and heavy, and they are sensitive to small changes. One that starts swinging shut on its own, or catches at the top corner, is a reliable early warning.

Then the plaster. Lath-and-plaster or early fibrous plaster walls crack at the corners of door frames and along cornice lines as the frame shifts beneath them.

Extensions complicate things

Very few of these houses are still the shape they started. A rear kitchen and bathroom were often added in the 1950s or 1960s, sometimes a sleep-out was enclosed, and many have had a modern extension in the past twenty years. Each addition may sit on a different stump system:

Original house on hardwood stumps.
Mid-century lean-to on cheaper timber, often shallower and in worse condition than the original.
Recent extension on concrete stumps or a slab.

A reblock needs to tie these back together so the floor runs through without a step or slope at the junction.

Getting in and getting the gear in

Brunswick and Coburg blocks are narrow. Side passages are often barely wide enough for a wheelbarrow, and some houses are built boundary to boundary. Rear lanes help a great deal when they exist.

Practically, this means stumps and bags of concrete are carried in by hand, and spoil from each hole comes out the same way. It takes more labour than a job on a wide suburban block, and the quote will reflect that, but it is routine work in these suburbs.

Digging through clay and rock

Under most of Brunswick and Coburg, the soil is heavy grey or black clay sitting on basalt. Footing holes are dug to the depth on the permit drawings. In some streets the crew reaches that depth easily; in others they hit basalt on the way down and have to break through or stop on solid rock, depending on what the surveyor accepts.

The order of work

A typical full reblock on one of these houses goes roughly like this:

Permit issued through a private building surveyor.
Props and jacks set up under the bearers in the first section.
Old stumps removed in small groups, holes dug and inspected.
Concrete pads poured, and the replacement stumps stood and plumbed.
Section by section, the crew works across the whole floor.
House let down and packed to the level readings agreed at the start.
Final inspection and sign-off by the surveyor.

For a single-storey inter-war house, allow somewhere around one to two weeks on site once work starts. Rock, low crawl spaces and extra repairs can stretch that.

Living in the house during the job

Most owners stay. You will hear the work and feel the floor move slightly as it is jacked. Take valuables and pictures off the walls, clear the tops of cupboards and expect a few days of dust near the subfloor access points. Gas and water connections may need to be loosened briefly as the floor is lifted.

After the reblock

Once the floor is level, internal doors usually swing true again. Some may need minor adjustment. Old cracks stop growing, though they will not close up. Give the house a few weeks before patching and painting.

If you own an inter-war weatherboard anywhere from Brunswick East across to Coburg North, a free subfloor inspection will tell you where your stumps are up to.

Reblocking an Inter-war Weatherboard in Brunswick or Coburg: What to Expect