Language curiosity: a friendly foot will hold up your house

JIMENA (Cádiz) My house needs a pie de amigo with some urgency, or I might wake up in the chicken run next door one morning…  Yes, it needs a ‘friendly foot’, or ‘the foot of a friend’. You won’t find it easily in an ordinary dictionary (not even in my technical one, which had thus far never failed me), unless you know to look it up under contrafuerte, which translates to ‘abutment’, ‘buttress’ and even ‘stiffener’. On consultation, Jimena’s Town Architect, Juan Luis Callejo, said that pie de amigo has long been used with ‘lay people’ as an easy way to explain the thing. I like the idea of a friendly foot holding me up.