Many old homes, especially those that were built in the 60s and 70s will need to look out for the following signs of decay, this is because many houses built at this time period especially in Australia were built on wooden stumps. Over the years these wooden stumps can get damaged due to the aging of the wood, soil erosion, and pest issues. Soil conditions can also change over the years due to unavoidable circumstances, all of this can weaken the foundation of your house.

This issue goes unnoticed most of the time, and there will be other, more obvious signs by the time you realize it. One way to test this is to get a marble and place it on the floor, if it continues to roll down on its own then you may have an issue. This less obvious but important sign shows that your stumps are deteriorating. As your foundation repair continues to deteriorate, some of the other more obvious symptoms start to appear, you would notice that your interior and exterior walls are starting to crack more often and the doors and windows are not fitting properly as they used to.

How do you fix the issue?

Each house is different and will show different ways of deterioration but the signs mentioned above will always be present. The solution to this issue is to raise the floor and fix or replace the stumps in a process known as house restumping. It is always important to evaluate the condition of your stumps if any of the signs mentioned above appear, some wooden stumps may appear fine but they really aren’t so in these cases it is important to evaluate properly and replace them. You can test the condition of wooden stumps by digging 10cm around the stump and then scratch the base of the wood. If it can be scratched easily then that’s a sure sign of needing to replace the stumps.

The terms reblocking and restumping can be used interchangeably as they both mean the same thing. In this process, professionals raise the floor from its foundation in the area that’s damaged using hydraulic jacks and then they either spread out the existing stumps or remove them altogether. This needs to be done by a reputable professional or company as a poor service can cost you a lot eventually. There will be some kind of damage to the floor during this process but this is usually repaired by the professionals once they’ve completed their job.Most homeowners opt for galvanized steel or concrete steel as they tend to last longer than wood, they aren’t vulnerable for termites, they can’t absorb moisture, they are less expensive and most importantly, they don’t warp like wood does.