Investment propertyAccommodate Aging in Place
A few weeks ago, an enthusiastic publicist trying to promote a product e-mailed me with a novel idea about something called "universal design."
I tried to explain that I had been writing for at least eight years about the concept of making a house accommodate people as they aged and that I even have a chapter in my book talking about it.
The publicist apologized. Apparently, universal design was news to her.
What is the real news, I suppose, is that I"ve reached a point in my life in which universal design is becoming a handy thing to have around the house.
I"ve noticed the difference in the way I deal with opening and closing doors, mostly. Three of our doors, including the back one, have aging-friendly lever handles. The rest have door knobs, which I"m finding more difficult to grasp and turn.
I can better understand the need for first-floor living, which is a major concept in the universal-design scheme. The layout of my first floor could easily accommodate it, with minor modifications to the bathroom, and the addition of a ramp from that levered back door to the courtyard and adjustment to backyard gate that would allow it to open wider for a wheelchair.
The fact that the kitchen was added just a few years ago means that the center island accommodates wheelchair users. The dishwasher is front-loaded, the stove"s controls are on the front and accessible from a seated position, and the refrigerator"s top shelf is also accessible.
There are two first-floor bedrooms -- three if you count the library, which was the third bedroom of the house before the attic was converted to a full master suite. One is my older son"s room, and he lives full-time in Southern California. The other bedroom belongs to my younger son. The library has a foldout sofa for guest accommodations.
My last house was not accommodating, built when the life expectancy was 45 years. People who lived longer were hardier and didn"t usually need such accommodations.
First floors were public areas, so there were no bedrooms. Bathrooms were kept on the second floor and thus out of the public eye. Doorways were narrow and had thresholds, and there were plenty of stairs on both ends of the house. Once you got upstairs and were infirm, you needed a full-time caregiver.
It would have cost a small fortune for me to have aged in that house, and whatever redesign of the first floor I could have come up with would have been odd-looking, to say the least. I don"t think it would have been completely accessible anyway.
Sometimes, it is easier to move, which is why builders have come up with over-55 communities.
As baby boomers have started to sprint past age 55, builders have grown to accept universal design. After the 1998 Builders Show in Dallas that featured a universal design prototype house, I asked a local builder whether he would be adding these amenities to his homes.
His response was that grab bars in showers and stoves with front controls sent the wrong message to a generation that believed they would live forever and in good health, thanks to all that running they did every day.
Today, universal design is a standard feature of his houses. Those same runners have developed bad knees, and the idea of living forever frightens people who aren"t sure whether they"ve put away enough money for such long lives.
Is the concept of aging in place a viable one? Yes. Does aging in place have to be ugly? The ramp issue in some older homes is indeed an ugly solution, but whatever works. In the last 10 years adding an elevator has become less expensive in many situations, and some high-end builders who have been offering elevators as options are now providing them as standard features.
Retrofitting many older houses to accommodate an elevator is no longer prohibitively expensive, perhaps -- and this is an example -- $10,000 instead of $25,000.
As I said in the chapter on universal design in my book, it is much easier to build universal design into a new house than having to retrofit an older house. I also suggest that if you are planning an addition to an older house, it doesn"t add all that much to the renovation costs to be accommodating.
It is hard to accept the fact that we are getting older. Although I am no fan of vinyl siding, I can appreciate the lower maintenance that accompanies it after spending much of November on a ladder finishing the final coat of paint on my cedar-sided house.
Still, I"m not willing to get off the ladder, so universal design seems like a viable solution to the aches and pains that seem to be accompanying increasing age.