During the summer 2000 I helped my friend Ray Amos to repair his 220 year old farmhouse. (More on the property)

									The house is really well built. The outside walls are stone and up two 3 feet thick. All the timber in the house is strong and straight, but the center beam was sagging up two 3 inches. It was the only structural problem that the house had and we decided to fix it. Once we cleared out the basement and tore down a few partitions, we had the center beam exposed. After a thourough inspection we concluded that the sagging resulted from rot at the bottom of the support columns. They were originally set right on a big rock that rested on the bedrock under the house. 40 years ago somebody poored a concrete floor in the basement and covered the post bases. This led to rot and the sagging. Our plan was pour new footings, add two support posts and replace the rotten ones and distribute the load with header pieces. Here a picture of the rot. You can see clearly the line up to which the post was embedded in concrete.
							This is one of the new footings. It extends down to the bedrock and has a 1" steel plate as seat for the new post. On the side is an anchoring plate.
								This is one of the four header pieces, that distribute the load onto the posts. Ray spared no effort to bandsaw these and sand the faces.
		Here we see the center beam supported by 10 jacks. We were slowly raising the whole house. When you do this you have to be really slow. A Sagging that happened over two hundred years can not be fixed in a day.
									Ray operating a screw jack and preparing the posts.
			The finished product. The new posts are in place and under load. One of the posts sitting on the steel plate.