Structural Timber Repairs In Caulfield

Structural repairs are quoted per member and per metre of access rather than as a flat rate, because the work is entirely dictated by what is under the house and how easily we can get to it. Replacing a run of rotted joists in a subfloor with reasonable clearance is a modest job. The same work in a subfloor with 400mm of crawl space and no external access is a much bigger one, and honest quotes reflect that. Removing a load-bearing wall and installing a steel beam is the most commonly requested item on this page and generally runs $3,500 to $9,000 including the structural engineering and the beam. Where scope cannot be fixed until the floor is up, we quote at a day rate in the range of $650 to $950 plus GST and cap it with your approval. Call 0468 347 781 and we will look before we price.

Most subfloor work happens underneath you, so you can normally stay in the house for the whole job. Replacing bearers or joists under one room usually takes two to four days including propping, and the affected room comes out of use rather than the whole house. Restumping is more disruptive, since sections of the house are jacked and relevelled and doors and cornices commonly need adjusting afterwards, and that runs a week or more depending on the number of stumps. Removing a load-bearing wall is a two to four day job on site once the engineering is done, though the engineering itself takes a week or two in front of it. We give you a room-by-room programme with the quote rather than a vague window.

Any job that changes how load travels through the house needs an engineer, which in practice means removing or altering a load-bearing wall, changing a span, or replacing structure that has failed for reasons nobody can yet explain. We tell you at the site visit whether your job needs one, and we can put you in front of an engineer we work with rather than leaving you to find one. Where an engineer's detail exists, we build to that detail exactly and flag anything on it that will not work on site before we start cutting. StickBuild Construction carries $20 million public liability insurance under ABN 39 276 982 297, and we will send you the certificate of currency on request.

We get into the subfloor with a light and a moisture meter rather than diagnosing from inside the room, because the symptom upstairs almost never sits directly above the cause. We look at stump condition and packing, bearer and joist ends where they sit on the stumps, ant caps, subfloor ventilation, and any point where a plumbing leak or a blocked downpipe has been putting water into the ground for years. We check whether the floor is out of level uniformly, which suggests ground movement, or locally, which suggests a failed member. You get photographs of what we found, an explanation of the cause, and an itemised quote for the repair that addresses it. If the cause is something outside our trade, such as a plumbing leak or drainage, we tell you to fix that first.

It can be either, and telling them apart is most of the value we add. Bouncy floorboards over one section usually mean a joist has failed, a bearer has sagged, or a stump has dropped, and it will keep getting worse. Doors that stick in winter and free up in summer are the classic signature of reactive clay, which is common right through Glen Iris, Bentleigh and Malvern East, where seasonal swelling and shrinking moves the footings a few millimetres each way. Cracks that open in the same cornice every year point the same direction. Movement that never comes back is different again, and that one usually means something under the house has failed rather than flexed. We measure levels across the floor and inspect the subfloor before telling you which of the three you have.

Repair is right when the failure is confined and the rest of the structure is sound, which is more often than people assume, and it is dramatically cheaper. Replacement of a whole run of bearers and joists makes sense when the damage is widespread, when the original timber was undersized, or when access is bad enough that coming back twice would cost more than doing it once. Restumping is the right answer when the stumps themselves are the failure, typically timber stumps that have rotted at ground level, and it is the only one of the three that fixes a whole house that is out of level. What we will not do is level a floor that is sitting on stumps we know are going, because that buys you a year. We will show you what we found and let you choose with the numbers in front of you.