Inner West · Yarraville 3013
Restumping in Yarraville
Yarraville's housing stock is mostly Victorian, Edwardian and Federation weatherboard — a lot of it sitting on original red gum or early concrete stumps that are now well past 100 years old. Add the village's famously narrow streets and near-zero side access, and restumping here is a different job to restumping on a quarter-acre block out east.
Yarraville housing — what we are usually dealing with
Walk from Yarraville Village out towards Anderson Street and you are looking at rows of single-fronted weatherboard cottages and Edwardian villas, most built between 1890 and 1930. These were built on timber stumps set straight into the ground — no concrete footing, no ant capping, no damp course under the stump. A red gum stump can genuinely last a century, but once the sapwood collar at ground level goes, the whole house starts to follow it down. The tell in Yarraville is usually the front two rooms dropping away from a later rear extension that was built on modern concrete stumps and has not moved at all.
The ground under Yarraville
Yarraville sits on the Maribyrnong flats, which means silty river deposits over clay rather than the raw basalt clay you get further west. That soil holds moisture against the base of a timber stump for long stretches of winter, which is why rot here tends to run ahead of the same-aged stumps in a drier suburb like Coburg. Homes closest to the river and the old industrial flats generally show it first.
What this means for your job
The practical constraint is access. Single-fronted cottages on 6-metre frontages with a shared boundary on one side and a laneway on the other mean no bobcat, no truck, and no room to swing a bearer. Stumps get hand-dug, spoil gets barrowed through the house or the laneway, and the job takes longer than the same house on a wide block. Any quote for Yarraville that has not accounted for hand excavation is a quote that will change once work starts. Heritage overlay also applies across much of the Village precinct, so re-levelling work that changes the external floor height is worth checking against council before it starts.
What we see in Yarraville homes
- Floors falling away towards the front rooms while a newer rear extension stays dead level
- Gaps opening between the skirting board and the floorboards in the hallway
- Internal doors in the original part of the house catching at the top corner
- Springy or bouncing floorboards near the centre of a front room, which usually points at a failed internal stump rather than a perimeter one
Restumping costs in Yarraville
$14,000 – $22,000 for a full restumpA standard single-fronted Yarraville weatherboard sits at the upper end of the Melbourne range because almost every stump is hand-dug and spoil has to be carried out. Partial restumps — the front half of the house only — commonly land between $7,000 and $12,000.
Indicative range only, based on typical jobs in this area. Access, soil conditions and the extent of movement change the number — a fixed price follows an on-site inspection.
The right service for Yarraville
Yarraville homes of this era have suspended timber floors on individual stumps, so restumping and reblocking is the service that applies — replacing failed stumps and re-levelling the floors above them. Read what the full job involves, including permits and the lifting process, on our restumping page.
Restumping in Yarraville — your questions
Do I need a permit to restump a house in Yarraville?
Yes. Restumping in Victoria is building work and requires a building permit issued by a registered building surveyor, and your builder must be a registered building practitioner. In Yarraville there is a second layer: much of the Village and the surrounding streets sit under a heritage overlay in the Maribyrnong Planning Scheme, so if the work changes the visible external floor height or the front elevation, a planning permit may be needed as well. A good contractor handles the building permit as part of the job — always confirm in writing who is lodging it.
Can you restump a Yarraville cottage with no side access?
Yes, and it is the norm here rather than the exception. On a single-fronted cottage with a shared boundary, stump holes are dug by hand and the spoil is barrowed out through the hallway or the rear laneway with floor protection down. It adds roughly two to four days to a typical job compared with a machine-accessible block, which is exactly where the price difference comes from. It does not change the finished result.
My Yarraville house has a newer extension out the back — does that need restumping too?
Usually not. Extensions built from the 1990s onward sit on concrete stumps in proper footings and rarely move. The problem is the junction: the original house drops while the extension stays put, so the crack shows up right at the join and people assume the new work is at fault. In that situation you restump the original section and re-level it back up to meet the extension, rather than touching the newer structure at all.
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