About Restumping Mornington Peninsula

What this site is

This site connects Mornington Peninsula home owners, holiday-house owners, landlords and buyers with local restumping and underpinning contractors. When an enquiry comes in, it goes to a builder who works on the Peninsula and holds the registration the job needs. The site is not the builder. It does not quote, dig or sign anything; it explains what the job involves and puts you in touch with someone who can do it.

All work is carried out by appropriately licensed contractors. In Victoria that means a builder registered with the Building and Plumbing Commission, which for restumping and reblocking applies regardless of the value of the work.

A lot of the people who write in do not live here. They own a house at Rye or Blairgowrie or Somers that the family uses over summer and a few long weekends, and the first they hear of a problem is a neighbour ringing about a sagging verandah, or a building report on a sale, or the back door that would not shut on the first trip down after winter. The pages are written with that owner in mind as much as the one who lives in Mornington year round.

Why the guides are here

A restump is a week or two under a house surrounded by rules most people meet once. The Building Act and the permit that comes from a private building surveyor rather than the Shire. The registration that applies at any job value. The written contract at $10,000 and the Home Warranty insurance at $20,000. Report and consent if the lot is flood prone, consent before digging near an easement, a landslide risk assessment if the block is in an erosion overlay, a word with the heritage team if it is in a heritage precinct. None of it is hard, but it is scattered across the Commission, Consumer Affairs and the Shire's website, and a first-time owner has no way to know which bits apply to a weatherboard at Capel Sound.

Then there is the ground. Within one Shire the houses sit on deep calcareous dune sand at the Nepean end, dune sand with a cemented pan around Rosebud, peat at Tootgarook, sandy loam over waterlogging clay around Hastings and Baxter, and shallow gritty soil over granite on Arthurs Seat and Mount Martha. What stump goes back in, and how deep, is not the same question in Portsea as it is in Bittern.

The pages here put the permits, the thresholds and the ground in one place, in plain words, with a link to the source wherever a figure or a rule is stated.

How the rule pages are written

• Everything is dated. Each page describing a rule says the month it was written, and the fees quoted carry the year of the schedule they came from, which at the time of writing is 2025-26.
• The source is linked. The Building and Plumbing Commission for permits, registration and insurance. Consumer Affairs Victoria for contracts. Mornington Peninsula Shire for its building fees, report and consent, easements, heritage and erosion overlays, termite designation and landslide information. Victorian Resources Online for the soils. The Bureau of Meteorology for rainfall. The ABS for the housing numbers. The legislation itself for the Acts and Regulations.
• Where this site and the source differ, the source is right. That is stated in the dated box on each rule page, and it is meant.
• Figures are quoted, not promised. Thresholds, fees and dates change. The Home Warranty threshold moved from $16,000 to $20,000 on 1 July 2026, and the landslide overlay was cut from about 33,000 properties to about 6,000 on 19 October 2026. The pages say what the published figure was and point you at the body that sets it.
• Unverified things are said to be unverified. This site has not found a published site classification for any Peninsula town, has not found the Shire's 2026-27 building fee schedule, and does not know whether your particular lot is still in EMO7. It says so rather than guessing.
• You are pointed at the right person. A restumper is not the person to design underpinning, classify your soil, assess landslide risk or decide a heritage application. Those are the engineer, the geotechnical laboratory, the Shire's planners and the heritage team.
• Nothing here is legal advice.

What you will not find here

• No testimonials or star ratings.
• No gallery of past jobs. Photographs are illustrative only and do not depict specific jobs. The house in the picture is not your neighbour's.
• No promise about the ground. The site class of a block comes from a geotechnical test, not from a web page, and not from the fact that the house next door is on sand.
• No prices for the work. Two houses the same size, one in Tootgarook and one on a slope at McCrae, can be priced a long way apart. The cost guide explains what moves the number. Shire and surveyor fees are quoted where they are published.
• No claim that a rule does not apply. Whether your house needs a planning permit as well as a building permit depends on the overlays on the lot, and the pages say to ask the Shire rather than telling you it is fine.

What to expect when you make contact

1. You give the town, what the house sits on if you know, what you have noticed inside, and a few photos. If you are not on the Peninsula, say who holds the key.
2. The overlays on the property are checked from the address: heritage, erosion, bushfire, flood prone land.
3. A builder comes back to you with questions about the subfloor and the access, then a price range or a time to look.
4. A subfloor inspection, a written quote, the contract, the building permit and any report and consent the lot needs, in that order.
5. If a settlement, a building report or a builder's start date is driving it, say so up front. It changes what gets lodged first.

Towns covered

Mornington, Mount Eliza, Mount Martha, Dromana, Safety Beach, McCrae, Rosebud, Capel Sound, Rye, Tootgarook, Blairgowrie, Sorrento, Portsea, St Andrews Beach, Hastings, Somerville, Tyabb, Baxter, Bittern, Crib Point, Somers, Balnarring, Red Hill, Flinders, Shoreham, Merricks, Main Ridge, Moorooduc, Tuerong and Boneo, along with the hinterland and the smaller settlements between them across the whole of Mornington Peninsula Shire, from Mount Eliza on the Melbourne side to Portsea at the end of the Nepean peninsula and Somers and Crib Point on Western Port.