The Art Establishment Project: Beam us up!

Big changes afoot at The Art Establishment! First, we cut ties with our contractor of a year and a half. The work was proceeding waaaaay too slowly, was becoming way too expensive and the quality was becoming shoddy. So, we hired a new contractor last Monday and fired our old contractor the next day. New beginnings! Our new guy, Oscar, has proven to be an honest and hardworking guy. The first thing he wanted to do was re-do the support beams that our old contractor reinforced with concrete last year. Oscar didn't like the look of the cracks in the concrete.

Remember this?:

The idea was to cut the beams off at the bottom because they were compromised due to moisture damage, then pour concrete into a mold surround and when it dried, we would have a beam supported by concrete under and around it. Well, our old contractor did 4, and we started noticing cracks. Then the cracks got bigger. So yesterday Oscar knocked the concrete off , and lo and behold...the old contractor had only cut 2 of the beams and the other 2 he didn't bother to cut, but just poured concrete around. This just hid the problem and did not fix it. Here's what we found:

This is one of the beams that should have been cut. The bottom was rotted halfway through.

This beam actually was cut, but with rotted wood left in it. Why not cut it off above the rot to strengthen it?

Oscar is on the job now, and when we left him at 5:00 this evening, he was mixing concrete to patch the floor under the beams. When we came back at 9:00, this is what we found:

In under 4 hours, he had put supports up alongside 4 of the beams, cut those other 2 beams off, and patched the concrete floor under all 4 beams. Amazing!

In other news, progress has been slow but steady. Here's what's been happening: