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A hurricane or a flood can be a devastating experience for home and other property owners and cleaning up after the fact can be a daunting task, especially if it is the first time that you have to deal with a problem such as this.  If it is your first home that is affected, you might not have a good understanding of where to go after the waters and storm clouds have receded off into the distance.  Sometimes hiring a professional to deal with extensive damage is often one of the best and safest things that you can do, but not everyone can afford a professional. 

One thing that you should be very concerned about is downed power lines.  If you have a downed power line on your property, ALWAYS assume that the downed line is a live one.  Do not allow anyone to touch it or, if it lies across your driveway or the street where you live, drive over it.  Not even an experienced electrician can tell you if a line is live just by taking a look at it.

After the storm is gone and the electricity has been returned to your home, the first thing that you want to do is turned the electricity to your home OFF so that you can take care of getting rid of the standing water that may exist in your home.  This is especially important after a hurricane or a flood when there is likely to be standing water.  Do what you can to get things dry as soon as possible without using an artificial heat source to do so.  Remove wet furniture from the house and put them outside to dry. 

Water damage is a serious risk during these times and during a hurricane, there is likely to be some kind of debris on the roof if your home.  Remove this debris and check for any holes that might have been made in your roof during the storm.  If there are holes, cover them up with tarp the best that you can, especially if you are expecting more rain.  After you do that, go into the attic and assess just how much water has leaked into it.  Insulation that has gotten wet should be removed immediately.  It is no longer any good and only creates excess weight on your ceiling.

If you prepared for the hurricane before it reached your city or town, then odds are that you will not have many windows that have been blown out due to high winds.  If you did not have time to prepare properly, however, you might have quite a bit of glass to clean up.  If you are not expecting more rain, leave them uncovered to help dry the house out after you get rid of the broken glass.

Houston Emergency Water Restoration

While Penicillin is a drug manufactured from mold and is used around the world to help fight infections, there are other kinds of penicillium molds that can cause disease.  A species of penicillium that is native to Southeast Asia, has been known to cause infections in the region where HIV and AIDs have become epidemic and the condition resulting from these infections has been named Penicilliosis.

Penicilliosis is a kind of infection that is caused by the mold Penicillium marneffei and studies show that it currently the third most occurring opportunistic infection in individuals infected with HIV and AIDS in Southeast Asia.  This fungus occurs in high numbers throughout the region and is generally restricted to the area. 

As with all molds, it is a fungus at room temperature, but when it makes its way into the body and is heated up to body temperature, it becomes a yeast.  The symptoms of such an infection can include skin lesions, generalized lymphadenopathy, hepatomegaly, anemia, and fever; abdominal pain has also been noted along with weight loss.  Sometimes the skin lesions can appear on the ears, fingers, toes, genitalia, and on the face.  Cases of pneumonia have been reported to occur, as well.  The most often occurring symptom of penicilliosis is a skin rash that forms small bumps on the surface of the skin and they often have ulceration and this commonly happens on the upper part of the body.

While the mold that causes this condition is endemic to Southeast Asia, anyone traveling to the region is at risk to become infected; however, it rarely occurs in individuals who do not have a weakened immune system.  Anyone who has HIV or AIDS is advised to either be extremely careful if traveling to the region or to not travel to the region at all. 

Without treatment, these infections have quite a high mortality rate and even with treatment, the mortality rate hovers at around twenty percent.  Before AIDS became an epidemic, cases of this mold causing any kind of infection were rare.

Biopses of lymph nodes, bone marrow, and skin lesions can detect the presence of the fungi.  The fungal cultures that are grown from the swabbing of skin lesions or other samples taken from a person’s body are characterized by a flat green surface and a deep red color underneath.  Antifungal therapy with amphotericin, followed by maintenance treatment with a drug called itraconazole is recommended.

Emergency Water Restoration

If I was building a new home, the last thing that I would want to find out at the last minute is that it has been being built with moldy building materials. This happens a lot more often and is a lot more serious than you might think that it is. Mold is a big problem in homes these days, either due to not paying attention to the condition of your home while you are living in it, due to a natural disaster such as a hurricane, or perhaps the most avoidable reason, it was built into the home that you currently live in.

Mold gets built into brand new homes all the time and it is not only the contractor’s fault, but also the owner’s for not paying attention to the building materials being used at the time. For someone paying to have the home built, what they need to do to help prevent this is to pay attention to what is going on at the building site and to visit it often. The building should be completely covered with a tarp until the walls and roof are totally finished and there is no possibility for rain, snow, or any other kind of precipitation to get into the house.

Before building begins you should inspect all the building materials such as the lumber, sheetrock, insulation, and etcetera that are being used. Inspect them and if you see any signs of mold at all, have them tested with a home test kit and set them aside until you are sure that they are not contaminated.

Something just as important as the other things mentioned here is to make sure your contractor and his or her workers are not storing the building materials directly on the ground. This is just asking for mold to start growing on these and this is completely avoidable by just raising the materials up off the ground. They should come into contact with the soil as little as possible, if at all.

Mold testing during different stages of the home’s development should also take place. The testing should be in the beginning, near the middle, and after the home is completed.

As long as you pay attention to what is going on around the new site of your home while your contractor is working on it, you should be able to almost completely avoid mold being built into your home.

Water Removal Service

We all want the same action Stevie Ray Vaughan had. I mean guitar action, string height, neck relief, fret level. I’m talking the way the ‘action’ on his guitar is set up. Why would someone want a guitar ’setup’ like Stevie Ray’s? Well for one thing, he is one of the best blues guitar players that ever lived. A relatively close second to Jimi Hendrix.

‘Lenny’, was one of Stevie Ray’s favorite guitars. Because I do some setup work and understand the specs Stevie Ray used for this particular guitar, I wanted to share the specifications with you. I reviewed a ‘Lenny’ guitar, and boy oh boy is it setup nice. Briefly, I love to do setup work, it’s very mechanical and precise and I enjoy setting up guitars for people and then hearing them say “it never played like this before.” I am not a guitar maker though, I am a setup artist.

Stevie Ray’s ‘Lenny’ Setup specs:

Scale length 25-1/2″ with a compounded 7-1/4″ to 12″ compound radius.

Frets are huge, .110″ x .055″ new.

Strings are GHS Nickel Rockers, super large guage .013″to .058″. Must have had giant super human strength in his hands!

Nut action is .o20″ on low E at nut and 3.5/32″ at 17th fret. On the high E the action is .012″ at nut and 5/64″ at 17th fret.

Simply put, these are the most critical points of adjustment. Not the only ones, but combine the different adjustments in the proper order and you have a guitar set up like Stevie Ray. Realistically speaking, if you have the specs, than it can be setup up your way or to your favorite guitarists specs.

Personally I like an even lower action, or string height over the frets. As low as I can get it without fretting out. I came up with my own strategy from reading and trying setup adjustments from many players, such as Jeff Beck and Eric Johnson, to name a few. I also craft a bone nut as a replacement nut for all of my guitars.

With that being said, I don’t recommend doing your own setup work. Especially if you have never done a setup or don’t have the correct tools. I would like to suggest trying it on a cheap guitar the first time. If not, for a perfect setup find a competent luthier and give him the setup specs that you want.

Got any questions? Fell free to ask Guitar Players Center via our comment area. I will attempt to answer all questions. If you like the vibe, please share it with others. Enjoy.

Remodeling a kitchen is by all means one of the most daunting, frustrating, and overwhelming projects a homeowner can ever undertake. The shear volume of decisions that need to be made in the complete absence of any clear right or wrong answers (since every kitchen and kitchen owner is different) make the process a little bit like going to hell – as though your tiny Williamsburg apartment isn’t hell enough at $2300 a month!

One of the best things you can do if you’re remodeling a kitchen in Brooklyn is check out a NYC kitchen showroom. But make sure that when you do, you’re doing it responsibly; that is, know how to use the showroom to make it and the kitchen designers who are likely employed by it work for you. The most important piece of advice I can offer on how to make a showroom visit worthwhile is to leave any expectation of finding your ‘dream kitchen’ within the 4 walls. Showroom kitchens are merely examples, samples – conglomerations of different materials, styles, appliances, and layouts designed to get you thinking about what you’d like to see in your own kitchen. That means that each display within the showroom should be considered piece by piece. Run through the following checklist:

1)      Are there any appliances here that I like?

2)      How do I feel about the way the kitchen is laid out? Is it easy to go from to the stove to the sink, the sink to the dishwasher, the fridge to the sink? Is it is easy to grab a plate, bowl, or utensils from the stove area?

3)      Do I like the floor, countertop, or cabinet materials?

4)      What do I think of the colors, textures, and patterns in the kitchen?

5)      Can I afford a kitchen that looks something like this?

6)      Can a layout like this fit in my space?

These questions should form a basic guideline for how to view showrooms and will hopefully facilitate the whole kitchen remodeling process