When you stepped into the Art House through the front door, you walked over a “buckle” in the floor and started heading downhill. There was a 2″ drop as you crossed from the living room into the kitchen. It was so pronounced that I was able to place a marble at the top of the “hill” and watch it slowly roll to the bottom.
The house was built in 1901 on a “pier and post” foundation, a style of building that utilizes cement footers with 8″ square posts that hold up the framework of beams and floor joists. The town of Bucoda sits in a river valley that floods every 40 years or so. The Art House sits on the very edge of town and has avoided the flood waters each time; but the soil can be soft and crumbly and subject to sinking and shifting. Considering the age of the house and the condition of the soil, I suspected that one or more of the piers on the south east side of the house had sunk. Shoring up the piers was essential before I could move ahead with any other repairs on the house.
The new pier on the left is in the spot where the old post had completely rotted away.
At this point, you can see the old post lifted off its cement footing.
Two of the new piers and posts in final position.
I began by removing the cement boards that covered the open foundation and discovered it was worse that I first thought. One of the piers was completely rotted away and a second was in the process. No wonder the floor was sinking!
I used gravel and wooden blocks to stabilize the dirt and then inserted three 12-ton bottle jacks under the outer beam. I made sure to place a steel plate between the piston and the beam (otherwise, the piston would puncture the beam – multiplying the problem). Alternating from one to the other, I slowly lifted the house until the piers were no longer holding up the house. I knocked them loose and inserted three new cement bases in their place, along with three new posts (cut from 4×4″ pressure treated lumber). It took some pushing and pounding to get them into position, but after that, I released the pressure on the jacks and dropped the house onto its new piers.
You can still feel the buckle in the living room floor when you walk over it. But the 2″ slope has been removed and the foundation is back to full strength. That’s one more important project checked off the list!
The two sets of exterior doors presented an additional challenge. I was determined to rescue them from the scrap heap. They were more than 100 years old and divided into 10 lights for each pair – with an average of 2 panes busted on each door.
My Email Account is Sending Spam, What Should I Do?
Q:
I think my email account is sending spam to my contacts, what should I do?
My contact is sending spam to my email account, what should I do?
A:
The Quick Answer
If your email account is sending spam, do the following:
The Full Answer
If your contact, someone you know who is a real person, is sending you spam, you should send them an email/text/etc. informing them of the issue and include a link to this article in the message.
If your email account is sending spam, the email account has most likely been compromised by a hacker/spammer.
This is a fairly common occurrence, especially among online email clients like yahoo, gmail and outlook.com. That is not to say that it doesn’t occur with personal domain email accounts or other smaller email systems, it’s simply less common.
If you can still log into your account, then you should change your password. In most cases this will stop the spam from being sent out.
If you can’t log into your account you will have to contact your account provider and inform them of what has happened and regain control of your account.
You should also run virus software on all of your computers to make sure your computers have not been compromised.
It is also common that your smart phone has been compromised and has a virus. You should install and run virus protection for your phone as well. I recommend Lookout (https://www.lookout.com/).
Once you run the virus scans and a virus is found, make sure to remove it, and then change your email password again.
Then make sure to change the password for any other accounts that use the same password as your email account. I know this can be a big task, but it is necessary.
If you did find a virus, you may want to change all of your passwords for all of your accounts. It is likely that the virus has been tracking some or all of your password inputs.
My email account was hacked a few years ago and I changed most of my passwords, but forgot one. About six months after the initial hack, the hacker got into my itunes account and spent my available balance. Luckily I didn’t have a credit card associated with the account at the time.
Since you are going to be changing your passwords anyway, it would be a good time to create a stronger password scheme. Find out more about best password practices.