Don’t Waste Money on an Inaccessible Dream Home

Imagine that you just built your dream home.

You’ve invested countless numbers of hours planning it and agonizing over the most minute of details. Maybe you’ve even been involved in building it yourself and have shed blood, sweat and tears over it.

What if within a few short months or years, you, your spouse or a family member has a bad accident, a stroke, or gets diagnosed with a degenerative disease?

How does your dream home look now?

Not quite so dreamy

If you didn’t apply the principals of accessible design to your home, this may be what you’re facing………..

Insurmountable for some

The stairs up to the front door are now going to have to be converted into a ramp and you’ll have to pave the entry path from the parking to the front door.
The interior staircase is now an insurmountable hurdle for those who have severe mobility issues, and the staircase is too narrow to add a lift to.
That lovely big bathroom upstairs is now rendered inaccessible to anybody who can’t climb stairs. So that just leaves the pokey little powder room on the main level which is far too small for a wheelchair to turn around in, or even fit through the narrow doorway with one.
Since all the bedrooms are upstairs you now need to find a corner of the living room to put a bed into. This changes the whole dynamics of your home, eliminating privacy and therefore preventing any visitors from coming over.

At this point you will probably be considering selling your dream home in order to find a home more suitable to your new needs, as renovating would be too costly and would take too long.

On the flip side, if you had applied the principles of accessible design to your home, all you would have to do is make a few simple changes with very little disruption and keep on enjoying your new dream home for many years to come.

Maybe this is a little dramatic, but it’s an illustration of what kind of an impact accessible design could have on your future life.