Currently, it’s a buyer’s market for houses, so getting your dream home is a snap, right? What changes, though, if a buyer’s dream home has to be Electric Wheel Chair accessible? Locating an existing home that is also wheelchair accessible it hard to do. It’s more practical to stick with the home you currently own and, if permissible, customize your home to be wheelchair accessible. A simpler course of action, though not necessarily cheaper, is to erect a new house. Whichever of those options you decide on; what follows are a few universal pieces of advice to start with.

Obviously, a two-story home is not usually considered wheelchair accessible. Staircases can be challenges, and even motorized lifts must have substantially more square footage than residential staircases are designed to fill. If you might avoid upstairs sleeping quarters or finished basements in a structure; do it. Ramps are practical for sunken living rooms, but dramatic alterations in floor level usually give you more conundrums than they cure. So you really have to be careful.

If you currently are using a second story, it’s worth finding out if a full service elevator is possible. After your floors are settled, though, you ought to plan your floor coverings. Scatter rugs will not help you, because they are famous for becoming wrapped up in wheels. Carpets should work fine, assuming you have wall-to-wall carpets or they include a beveled trim edge that will be nailed to the floor. It is really easier than it sounds.

If you’ve been in a wheelchair for even a month or two, you have discovered that entryways and table heights are very important. A wheelchair accessible doorway ought to be a minimum of 32’ wide, and any work surfaces for a Mobility Chair user needs to be approximately 34” high. A wheelchair bound person can have difficulty reaching anything over 48” tall, so overhead doors or shelving should not contain anything important. This is something that is often overlooked.

A bathroom is meant to be an oasis of calm in today’s stressed-out world, therefore, your bathroom is not an area where you want to be constantly dealing with your physical condition. If you add nothing else, a 3 x 4

Tags: disability, health, medical, mobility

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 11:43 am and is filed under 66. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.