Introduction
February 2023
My goal: Avoid ever moving
I hate to move.
That statement explains why we have been in our current house for 23 years and were in our prior house for 15. Moving is just a royal pain, and I try to avoid it.
That said, if you do some quick math on the above paragraph, you’ll notice something: I’m getting old.
Now in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t unexpected. It certainly beats the alternative, and I plan to live another few decades (knock on wood). However, I think pretty much everyone loses mobility as we grow older, and my wife and I have both had incidents where we had to use crutches or walkers to get around. And when that’s happened in the past, we’ve realized an undeniable fact:
Our house has a lot of stairs.
While some folks might say, “Pft!! What’s a few stairs?” to this statement, the problem is best illustrated by this elevation drawing (not to scale):
As you can see, while our house is not particularly large, it does have 7 different levels which are accessed by 6 half-flights of stairs.
Needless to say, we need something more than a couple of stair lifts if we’re going to stay in this house.
So why don’t we just suck it up and move? Well, take a look at the photo at the top of this post. That’s a sample of the view we wake up to every day. We don’t want to give that up. Further, we thoroughly enjoy our two adult sons who live with us, and we don’t want to displace them simply because we are getting older and have to downsize to a condo or assisted living.
Our strategy: remodel to age in place
Instead of moving, my wife and I have decided to remodel our existing house so that we don’t have to move even as we become less mobile and less able to deal with everyday tasks. The term of art for this is Aging in Place, and it has become an industry unto itself.
While everyone will define aging in place differently, Carolyn and I focused on the following goals to guide our remodel. We want to be able to:
- Continue living in all levels of our home. While we can’t predict the future, we’re pretty sure we’re both going to have more difficulty going up and down stairs as we get older. Given we have a multi-story house, that’s a problem.
- Cook for ourselves. Designer kitchens are lovely, but overhead microwaves and cabinets to the ceiling are serious obstacles if we should have to be in a wheelchair.
- Do our own laundry. Those pesky stairs will be doubly difficult if we have to carry a laundry basket on them. Ideally we should be able to do our laundry somewhere near our bedroom.
- Be self-sufficient bathing. One of the worst parts of getting older is being forced to request assistance staying clean and using the toilet. Smart bathroom design can make that unnecessary.
- Get to and from our cars. While we have no problem navigating the two stairs down to our garage at present, those stairs could become a big impediment should we be in a wheelchair.
- Easily access our two-level basement. I initially thought this was a silly requirement, but then I realized that it’s important to have a place to store seasonal things like Christmas decorations. More importantly, though, I need access to all the systems that run the house, such as the electrical breaker panel, oil burner, internet connection, backup batteries, and solar panel controllers.
- And generally live in the house the rest of our lives. We plan for this to be the first and last whole home renovation of our lives, so we want it to be wonderful.
What makes this a bit more of a challenge is that we’d like to be able to do all of these things even if we are confined to a wheelchair or otherwise have limited mobility.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. What drove this project were our goals for the renovation, and more importantly, the constraints we accepted. That’s really where our story begins, so let’s dig in there.