![]() After living in this house for 21 months without being able to enter the hallway bathroom, Matt finally has easy access to this bathroom. The wood transition strip and hardwood flooring just outside the bathroom door still need work (which I’ll tackle when I work on the hallway), but it’s all the same height now. So I took all of that tile and the thick mortar bed out, down to the subfloor, and then very carefully figured exactly how thick the subfloor, Hardibacker, and tile each needed to be in order to be perfectly flush with the hardwood floor in the hallway. Those front small wheels on the wheelchair just couldn’t clear that lip. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do it. One evening after Matt had gone to bed, I got in his wheelchair and tried to get over that 1/2-inch tile lip and into the bathroom. The 1/2-inch lip on the bathroom tile at the entrance to the bathroom made that hallway bathroom completely inaccessible to Matt.Īnd I don’t mean that it just made it challenging. That alone was one of the main reasons I decided to go ahead and do the full remodel on the hallway bathroom earlier this year, rather than just doing a quick and cheap makeover. So I ended up removing all of this wood, down to the subfloor, and using the same red oak hardwood floor that’s in the rest of the house so that there would be no transition or height difference from the music room to the kitchen. But for Matt, any height difference in flooring makes maneuverability impossible. In fact, most of us probably wouldn’t even notice it. Transitions like that are generally perfectly fine for ambulatory people. But that would have created a transition at the kitchen doorway with a height difference in the floor. The easiest option would have been to just put very thin Hardibacker down over the top, and then tile over it. It wasn’t salvageable (i.e., not able to be sanded and refinished), so I considered my options. ![]() Remember way back when I was just starting my kitchen remodel, and I popped up all of those asbestos tiles and found wood underneath? But as soon as I replace those with new doors, I’d like for him to have room to maneuver through them without scuffing the doors with his metal foot pedals each time.įlooring transitions are another really big consideration. □ That’s not a big deal right now, since we still have all of the old bedroom doors. Right now, Matt is able to get through the 32-inch doorways with standard hinges, but he leaves scuff marks and gouges on all of the doors. So on a door like our master bedroom, where the door can only open a maximum of 90-degrees, the doorway would have an actual 32 inches of clearance rather than the current 30 inches with the door taking up valuable clearance space. These add about two additional inches of clearance to doorways. All of our bedroom doors are 32 inches wide, which is fine with Matt, but I do plan to switch out all of the standard hinges with offset/expandable door hinges. Our master bathroom already had a 36-inch door on it, and I widened the hallway bathroom door to 32 inches during the remodel. We were fortunate because so many old homes in our area only have 24-inch or 28-inch-wide bathroom doors. The standard doorway width for accessibility is 36 inches, but Matt maneuvers through 32-inch doorways perfectly fine. ![]() The two main areas of consideration are (1) doorway width and (2) any flooring transitions that make wheelchair navigation from one area to another difficult (or impossible). Not only do we have the space (this house is almost four times bigger than the condo), but I’ve been doing my best to add more and more accessibility as I make changes to each room. He’s able to move around so much more, and much more easily. That was life-altering, and it didn’t help that we were in a tiny condo at the time. It wasn’t until about five years after his diagnosis that he got to the point of requiring a wheelchair for mobility. until two years later, but even then, his symptoms (mostly occasional dizziness and some balance issues) weren’t severe. When Matt and I got married, he was perfectly healthy. And to be honest, I’m still learning, with Matt’s help and input. It’s always there in my mind, and it always has to be a consideration. Wheelchair accessibility is the first thing on my mind each and every time I make a decision regarding my house - where to put walls, where to take walls down, where to put doors, how wide to make doors, how to decorate a room, where to put the furniture, etc. ![]() Maybe when I’m 80 years old or older, but certainly not now in my 40’s.Īnd yet, here I am. To be honest, the topic of decorating and designing a home for wheelchair accessibility isn’t one that I thought I’d ever be talking about or having to think about.
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