My House Looks Like its in Detroit

Today we ripped the windows out of my house. "We" is euphemistic in that Ben did all the work while I sat exhausted in my studio behind the house amidst a pile of blue plastic containers full of stuff. Moving is hell, even if it's only into your own backyard.
I'd spent the past two months in mindless anomie, frittering away entire summer days that involved hours of Facebooking, biking and hiking. I felt in my unemployed state that I'd achieved the high mark of Boulder ne'er-do-well-ism. I got into the best shape in 7 years training for my 8 day mountain bike trip to Peru. And I loved having a pain free body from 2 months free of physical labor. Thus, I'm relinquishing the tasks of demolition and dumpster loading to my younger cohorts, while I get to hang out on my laptop (as demonstrated in the photo above from the Sunday paper) pretending that I'm doing work related activities. The truth is that after over 30 years of physical labor, me and my human corpus are ready for a break.
So my house looks like a stripped out foreclosure in Detroit. Except for no thieves came by to rip all the copper out of the house - I did have a Mexican neighbor stop by to ask for scrap metal today. Yes, you read correctly. I have a Mexican neighbor. Just recently I was thinking that I don't have any black friends - not even Facebook friends. I was going to put up a general post on FB asking for some person of color to friend me so I wouldn't exist so completely in a ghostly white social strata. I even found myself being suspicious, as so many of us white folks are, that this guy was from Aurora or Commerce City or someplace where Latino thieves come to steal stuff out of nice white people's houses in nice white subdivisions like Martin Acres. I racially profiled him - and I'm the guy who wrote my thesis at CU about racism and white privilege.
Today's epiphany is that I am a white guy who lives in a mostly white town and is privileged enough to own a "starter" home in a very wealthy town. And by owning my piece of the American Dream I am now entitled to protect my property by keeping out lower classes of people by further gentrifying the neighborhood.
Capitalism and the unprecedented wealth that our nation possesses found its limits in the sub-prime crisis and general financial meltdown precipitated by the abject greed of the Goldman-Sachs and Bernie Madoffs of the world. Our wealth, generated by the exploitation of both foreign and domestic labor and resource extraction has enabled us to industrialize and then technologize our society. And as our wealth increased so did the size of our homes. My modest 1100 square ft. house was a typical abode for a family of 4 in the 1950s with it's 3 tiny bedrooms and equally stunted kitchen. But it was a dream come true in post World War II America to own a subdivided chunk of paradise in the suburbs.
My remodel will create a 2250 square ft. house, just slightly smaller than the average American home. The floor plan will be open, with the kitchen flowing into the living and dining areas. Upstairs 3 bedrooms with vaulted ceilings will have unobstructed views of the flatirons. A large masterbath with a walk in closet will compliment the capacious master bedroom with it's exterior deck. The little brick house that once was will give way to a masterfully designed spacious home. I'm acutely aware of the moral dilemma: I'm destroying a perfectly good home, and recycling or throwing away thousands of man hours of work and tons of materials, only to put double the amount of labor and materials into creating a new home.
On an ecological level, even with the rigid Green standards imposed by the City of Boulder, I'm creating a profoundly negative impact. On my recent trip to Peru, I watched laborers making clay bricks for the simple masonry homes that most rural Peruvians live in. They source all of their materials locally and live in 500 or 600 s.f. dwellings. On an aesthetic level, my project makes perfect sense. The 1950s house layout is claustrophobic and lacking in fluidity. Living in a little brick box with several segmented boxes within it has few redeeming qualities.
I'm sure this home will bring great pleasure to its future inhabitants when I sell it and the modern farmhouse design will elevate the aesthetics of the neighborhood.
Tomorrow, all of the interior walls will come down. It's really going to be ghetto then. It's very committing to destroy a home - there's no turning back. My dreamlike summer has come to an end. It's time to put down the laptop and pull out the hammer. I'm actually quite excited.

My Brick House

I'm singing the refrain of "Brick House" to my co-worker Ben as he jackhammers the walls of my house. Now that my 50th birthday is around the corner, I've decided to let younger bodies do the destruction.There is a strange satisfaction for me in seeing the brick come down: I never liked my parent's simple square brick house in a working class part of Croton-on-Hudson, NY where we were the only Jews on the street of Irish-Catholic kids who persecuted me. The brick house represented some 50s baby boomer suburban dream and a construction boom that started in Levittown and worked its way into every metropolitan area. I vowed never to live in a boring brick house again - so I bought one with the intention of razing it to the studs to completely transform it. But tonight I feel a twinge of sadness. That brick house represented the stability and security of my childhood (which was emotionally insecure). Today, my parents still live in that same simple brick home that they bought in 1968. I spent today driving around Denver looking for a company to take my bricks to no avail. Tons of bricks lay prostrate around the perimeter of the house as if it was attacked by terrorists. But this plot was launched by me and my architect. Yes, I have guilt. Not just the Jewish guilt I've carried my whole life, but the guilt of taking a perfectly good home that a young couple and their small boy lived in and tearing it to the ground. I saw few other choices than to create a project for myself after the recession ended the glory days of the high end kitchen and bath remodels that we had the privilege of doing for 10 years. It's going to be a gorgeous home, and it's also going to further gentrify the neighborhood. The intention of affordability that this 1950s brick ranch provided its original owner is now obliterated in a pile of brick and mortar rubble. But as the phoenix rises from the ashes, I will rebuild it and make it a home - one that will cost almost 100 times more than the one built in 1956.