Demolition Begins

Can it be that more than a year has passed since I mentioned we were renovating a bathroom--that, in fact, a renovation was imminent? Of course. That's how we roll around here. Everything happens months and years after we say it will.

But now it really is beginning--total gut, back to the studs, with all the possibilities and pitfall$ an old house presents. This has been a big week. Add in Halloween and marks due and relatives coming to visit...yeah, that's all happening, somehow.

Day Zero, Tuesday: dumpster delivered. An item necessary to collect construction waste, of course, but reno veterans know that the hulking bin is an invitation to purge beyond the room in question. We are serial renovators.

Day One, Wednesday: Tim climbed the roof, strung tarps, punched exploratory holes (yes, there really is no insulation in the outer walls), and began hammering. As in past projects, we're doing as much of the demolition as possible before the contractor steps in next week, and Tim will also be rewiring the room. In fact, he's put in 98% of the sweat equity so far, but this weekend we plan to give the kids dust masks and safety glasses and let them do their worst with sledgehammers (maybe only one at a time, given small rooms and siblings). Meanwhile, our child chain gang will be kept busy hauling buckets of plaster and lathe to the dumpster.

Ripping out walls is therapeutic, especially if previous generations of homeowners opted for wonky corners and odd cuts of trim to accommodate the addition of mechanical systems. The house was built around 1902. Pretty sure indoor plumbing came later. 

Notice the original (?) wallpaper beneath layers of tile, adhesive and cement board. Notice the tile that I've hated for the fourteen years we've lived in this house.

Day Two, Thursday:  Major demo, major dust. The contractor came over for a pleasant chat first thing this morning, and this happened afterward.

Exciting, right? The possibilities are endless. I discovered the design website Houzz today, so that's a win for consumer excess. Since there are 468,000 photos of just bathrooms, I surmise that I'm the last person in North America to discover Houzz.

And then some cleanup happened.

Joe worked steadily for about an hour, making solid progress, but guess where I found him later?

I talked him down. Very calm, I was.

Here's the thing: we probably should have planned more before launching the destructo phase. It would be nice to share design ideas at this point, maybe post some paint swatches and tile samples, but I've got nothing. Complacent? Crazy? Surprisingly unstressed about it all. Next week will bring a different story. Stay tuned for the hurryup catchup decision-making phase.

And send advice, will you?

Everybody Knows: Inequality

Today I'm participating in Blog Action Day 2014 along with 1500 others writing from more than 100 countries about the topic of inequality.

Inequality is depressing and divisive, 100% bad news. Who wants to read bad news? Why should we? First, to raise awareness about the state of our world and our own communities, which are both damaged when inequality rises. Also, if you need further incentive to read to the end, there's a musical surprise related to today's theme. Stay with me?

Today is also World Food Day, when the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) releases its annual report on what people eat and how it gets produced. Another urgent topic is the Ebola outbreak, which the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern" back in August, but governments only began throwing money at in recent weeks, as it became clear that global really means global.

So, food and health care, both necessary to sustain life. What do they have to do with inequality?

Food

Enough food is produced annually to feed everyone on the planet, yet an estimated 805 million are chronically undernourished, according to the FAO's publication The State of Food Insecurity 2014. This is actually an improvement over previous years, but consider: 805 million. That's the equivalent of 2.5 USAs. It's the same as 24 Canadas. Nearly 1 in 7 human beings worldwide. All those people, hungry, with the accompanying misery, anxiety and lost potential. People no different than my children or yours.

Where are those hungry? No surprise, massive inequality mars this map of the world.

Have a look at another interactive map from the FAO. It's a wonderful tool to see how hunger has changed in severity and location over time.

Food insecurity for some households--that is, unequal access to food--is not just a problem in the global south. The rich nations of the world are also food insecure, in some places and for some populations. People continue to rely on food banks, particularly in hard economic times. In my community, a new report called Vital Signs indicates that in 2011-2012, the rate of food-insecure households (definition: those experiencing a shortage of good quality food, or at a risk of a shortage, because of a lack of income) in the greater Peterborough area reached 11.9%, compared with the Ontario average of 7.7%. Peterborough's rate has increased 4.1% since 2007. These are troubling figures.

Fortunately, local groups are taking action--trying to shape food policy and ensure that people have access to nutritious food. Vital Signs notes that 81,650 lbs of produce was harvested from 30 Peterborough community gardens in 2013. For a small city, that's amazing.

Health Care

For the first time, the World Bank has explicitly included the reduction of inequality as one of its goals, labeled as shared prosperity. In a speech in Washington, DC earlier this month, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim (a medical doctor) linked inequality and health care. Kim said:

"As the spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa shows, the importance of this objective could not be more clear. The battle against the infection is a fight on many fronts – human lives and health foremost among them. But it is also a fight against inequality. The knowledge and infrastructure to treat the sick and contain the virus exists in high and middle income counties. However, over many years, we have failed to make both accessible to low income people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. So now, thousands of people in these countries are dying because, in the lottery of birth, they were born in the wrong place."

So much has been written about Ebola--the scaremongering media coverage of the few US cases diagnosed so far is itself a gross form of inequality. Three cases against thousands, but the three command intense interest. Sadly, for a lot of people our world amounts to an Us vs. Them proposition. Some social media posts even suggested that aid workers in the Ebola zone should just stay put if they get infected: too bad for them--they risked their lives to help foreigners in faraway places that don't matter.  

This makes me angry. Because we share a common humanity. Every life is equally important. We should care about the desperately ill facing this deadly outbreak, without regard to nationality, and if we have the means to help them--as individuals and as countries--we should. (Doctors Without Borders is doing heroic work, if you're looking for donation options.)

Globalization has gutted national borders in many respects. Countries no longer operate in isolation from one another to the extent they did in the past. And businesses benefit from that--our governments promote the free flow of goods and money--exports and investments. If I can buy fresh flowers in the supermarket that were grown in Colombia, drink coffee from Guatemala, receive telecom service from workers in India, fly to Germany to visit my friend, wear clothes made by women in Bangladesh (and before them Vietnam, Macau, El Salvador, or Mexico, because the textile industry is ultra-mobile), use a computer built with parts from everywhere, then I must also be prepared to extend a hand to the people who live in those places. (Also those who seek to migrate--but that's a topic for another day.) We are connected, and not only by commerce. Think art, literature, food, film, music, social media, family...countless connections.

It's not fair to accept the advantages of globalization and reject responsibility for problems beyond our borders. It's inequitable.

A Musical Interlude

Here, as promised: a song about inequality (and a few other things). Thanks to the great Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows "that the dice are loaded."

Thank you for hanging in there, and please read on if you'd like a few more...

Links, Stats and Studies about Inequality

Oxfam, a key partner of Blog Action Day 2014, published a study in January 2014 showing that the 85 richest people in the world owned wealth equivalent to that held by the poorest HALF of the world's population. Since then, the situation has worsened--now just 67 billionaires own half of the world's wealth. This week, Credit Suisse released its Global Wealth Report 2014 which confirmed the continuing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, even while total global wealth has grown to record heights since the financial crisis. (See The Guardian for an excellent summary.)