By Suzanne Mintz

Making the Decision to Renovate, October 2004

The first time I saw it I knew this was the house for us. It was in an older neighborhood with big mature trees, deep front lawns, and no two houses exactly the same. It was a block away from a walking/biking path and just a half-hour commute downtown. But best of all, it met all of our accessibility criteria except one.

The One

Our house is a three-bedroom ranch with big windows and lots of closet space. The master bath has a small stall shower with a built in seat, probably the feature that more than any other told me this house had our name on it. There is a two-car garage, direct access to a very private, but rather small backyard and a floorplan that has a nice traffic flow. The only downside is that the garage is carved out of the basement and therefore not level with the living areas of the house. When we bought it in 1988/1989, a stepped path lead from the street to the front door. My husband, Steven, who has MS, could still walk then, albeit not well, and certainly not for long distances, but he could get up and down the stairs between the main level and the garage without assistance.

But that was many years ago. From the time we bought the house until now, the disease has continued its relentless attack on his body, and so we’ve periodically made some small adjustments and then some larger changes to accommodate his ever-increasing disability.

Changing Needs

When Steven could no longer safely climb the stairs to the basement we installed a chair glide. When he started using a wheelchair indoors, we found expanding hinges so that he could roll through the fairly narrow door of the hall bathroom. In fact we specifically bought the narrowest chair we could find specifically for that purpose. We lowered the threshold of the stall shower in our bathroom to make it easier for him to get in and out and eventually we took out the threshold all together and a created speed bump like mound that kept the water in the shower, but was low enough for Steven to shimmy over while holding on to the grab bars and then lower himself onto the built-in seat.

When he could no longer do the transfers to the stair glide we re-landscaped the front yard, changing the contour so that we now have a beautiful curving path, from the street, with a county approved curb cut. It’s definitely not ADA, the grade being fairly steep in one section, but now using his power wheelchair, Steven can easily get in and out of the house, and our front yard actually has considerably more curb appeal than it used to. The most recent accessibility project we undertook was to widen a turning in the corridor by slicing off the corners of the walls to make maneuvering the in-the-house manual chair easier, especially when spasticity causes Steven’s legs to jut out.

But now we’ve reached a point where the little stall shower with the built-in seat, and the 5’ x 8’ bathroom of which it is a part, can no longer meet our needs, and Steven has begun to use his power wheelchair indoors more and more. So we’ve come to the conclusion that like it or not it is time for a major renovation. Out bathroom is adjacent to one of the secondary bedrooms and we could break through and take over a portion of that room, but that would leave us with a two bedroom house, which won’t meet our needs for a guest room for our granddaughter and my mom, and an office for Steven. Nor will it solve the problem of the narrow corridor, or the fact that when it rains or snows going outside to get to the car is sometimes impossible.

Deciding to Renovate

We could of course look for a new place to live, but we love the house and the neighborhood and the fact that it is just 10 minutes from our daughter and her family.... And the likelihood of finding something that is so perfect that it wouldn’t require any alterations is nil. So here we are, on the verge of beginning a construction project, which will inevitably increase our mortgage when Steven is just a few years away from retirement. It is scary to say the least, but also exciting to imagine a house that really meets our needs now, and to the extent possible anticipates the needs we’ll have in the future. It is a commitment to “aging in place” as the new lingo goes.

Our house is on a fairly small lot with not much space between our house and the ones on either side. The front yard is deep, but the back only has room for a deck and a small patch of grass, so the only alternative is to go up, which is counter intuitive when your goal is wheelchair accessibility. It became obvious pretty quickly that we would need a very creative, knowledgeable and sensitive architect who could create a plan that really worked for us, that also met our aesthetic goals (we refuse to have our home look institutional) and that we could afford. Knowing up front that we would need an elevator and then a back up generator for emergencies made it clear that a big part of our budget would be spent on technology. It was time to not only look for an architect but also consult our financial planner and accountant to determine just how much we could realistically spend and still be able to have money for our other needs in retirement.