Creating Sub floor access

[deliria]

hi,
i'm new to this forum but hope some of you can help me out with some advice.
we bought a house in sydney 2 years ago.
in one corner of the house the floor is coming away from the wall due to a rotten bearer (?) which is sitting directly on the ground.
in fact because we are on a sloping block, on one side of our house the timbers sit on brick piers however as you move up the slope towards the other side of the house the timbers begin to sit directly on the ground. as you can imagine not much good for the wood & a huge potential termite problem (termites have been active prior to our purchasing the home).
ideally i would love to have the house jacked up on the problematic side, have soil dug away & then have the timbers on this side sit on brick piers as well. this will allow for better access to the crawlspace (of which there is barely none now), & get the structural timbers off the ground where they won't rot as readily & won't become termite food.
in the process i realise there may be quite a few bearers & possibly some piers that will need replacing.
could anyone give me a "ballpark" figure as to what it would cost to have a builder carry this out for me.?
its a 3 bedroom 12-15 square double fronted weatherboard home.
many thanks

[deliria]

surely someone has some idea....i'm not after an exact figure.
its been near impossible to get a builder to come out & give me a quote...
i just need some sort of ballpark figure as to what i might be up for.
thanks

[Marc]

What you are asking is rather difficult. A ball park figure can be 5,000 to 50,000 and even this is a wild guess.
Not enough information.

In Sydney this days, there is renovation fever and builders just like carpenters are able to pick and choose.

You have to understand that the variables are too many. You say your bearers are sitting on the ground. Not a good start.

Why are they on the ground? No builder in his right mind would build like that, so it is probably a home built by an owner many years ago when the council did not care too much about standards. Is it possible that you are on rocky ground too hard to dig? What about pipes? A shonky builder may have storm water drains running under the house . . . . . . A builder venturing a repair figure will need to take surprises into consideration.

The first consideration would be, to open the biggest possible access from the higher side. Second to start digging out as much dirt as possible. This in itself will bring the next problem, how deep are the footings? If they are superficial many if not all pears will need to be replaced. The perimeter footings, if they are just following the ground line, will prove to be uneconomical to replace, so you will never have a proper job.

As for cost, you can find a labourer willing to dig dirt under your house for some 100 to 150 a day, and providing you take out
Insurance for him, you can somehow get the job a head start, but unless you know what you are doing I wouldn't recommend to experiment.

There are people who specialise in underpinning houses with cracked foundation that know exactly what they are doing but they do not come cheap. Perhaps since it is weatherboard, you can consider rising the whole house. If you live anywhere near Mt Pritchard, there is a house that the owner lifted up some 2 meters to create a garage under it. Slowly and with a lot of sleepers he pinned it all up and is now in the process of bricking up the walls that will be the new "foundation".

Sincerely I think that you need to talk to builders on site and many of them, and then sit down and think if this is an economical proposition. How much value are you going to add to the house?

All in all an impossible question to be answered pinned in the air on a bulletin board . . . . . By me anyway.

[deliria]

thankyou marc,
well obviously a much bigger job than i ever anticipated.
here i was thinking it would just be a matter of digging out some dirt on one side, popping that side on piers & problem solved.
i don't know why the bearers seem to sit on the ground on one side...the house was built in 1906, i don't know if thats how they built them back then. there is a back extention (houses the kitchen, laundry & bathroom) that was built by the last owner (very badly) maybe 10 years ago & at some point this will have to be demolished & replaced, but at the moment surprisingly it still stands!!
the builders who have come to see about repairing our sloping dining room floor, don't seem at all surprised by the fact that the house looks like this, they claim to see it all the time with inner city properties...our dining room floor problem doesn't seem to phase them either they've seem a lot of it apparently.
no builder has suggested it is essential for us to do what i would like to do...no-one has said your house is about to fall down & our building report didn't suggest the house was particularly structural unsound...it mentions that structural timbers were sitting directly on the ground & that this could be an issue with termites.
like i said apart from the sloping dining room floor the house seems fine elsewhere...no cracks in walls etc. floor seems solid.
its a house in sydney's inner west (which i'm sure must be a builders paradise)...the houses all seem to be built extremely low to the ground I have lived in many houses here that haven't even enough crawlspace to allow for a building & pest report to be carried out with any success. it seems to be the nature of the beast...so by no means is my house unusual in that respect, i was just wondering if i could do something about fixing the situation to perhaps prevent future problems with sloping floors elsewhere.
a builder has quoted $2500 to fix our dining room floor....he said that what would basically have been maybe a $500 job in a house with sufficient crawlspace is this much in our house because they have to attack it from the top, thus destroying many floorboards in the process.
i guess i thought if i could elevate the house enough this problem wouldn't occur again.

[Marc]

Well, by no means did I intend to make you desist from the idea of reparing your floors.
Of course it is all a matter of degrees. How far do you want to go?

If you lowest side in your dining is against an external wall, you could dig along the wall outside and "attack" the job from the ouside. Still a lot of diggin but much more comfortable than going all the way under.

To rip the floor out seems a bit extreem but then again I have not seen the job, and this sort of jobs are the perfect excuse to overcharge. I would kep on asking for quotes, and perhaps circumscribe the job to just one room at the time.

A friend of mine wants a simple veranda rebuilt, easy job, piers are in place, easy money for 2 or 3 day's work and had 4 quotes and no one showing up to do the job (!)