Tips for Making Your Home Handicap Accessible

Are you planning on making some upgrades to your home to ensure it is handicap accessible? This type of retrofit process can quickly become complicated or expensive, but fortunately there are a lot of different ways you can make your home more accessible without having to go too crazy on remodeling. All it takes is some strategic swaps and builds to make your home much more functional for someone who has suffered an injury or simply cannot move around on their own the way they once could.

With this in mind, here are some places in your home where you can work with a handicap accessibility contractor in Pennsylvania to improve your home’s overall levels of accessibility:

• Doorways: Your doorways need to be wide enough for you to fit a wheelchair through them. The width of wheelchairs varies depending on the make and model, but oftentimes they are too wide to easily be pushed through these doorways. Depending on where the doorway is located in your house, widening could cost up to $1,000, but it’s a necessary task if a wheelchair-bound person is to be able to freely navigate through your home.
• Showers: For obvious reasons, step-in bathtubs are not considered handicap accessible. Most homeowners who are looking to make their homes handicap accessible convert their bathtubs into wheelchair accessible showers, or walk-in showers. You could also decide to install a bench seat in the shower to provide some greater support.
• Ramps: You’ll need to be able to get your wheelchair-bound loved one inside the house somehow, which most of the time means you’ll need to add ramps to exterior entrances to the home. You might also need to add ramps or lifts to staircases inside of your home if getting to a second floor is a necessity.
• Toilets: Standard height toilets can be difficult to use for people who are confined to wheelchairs. You can add toilet risers, which can be purchased relatively cheaply at many major retail stores and home improvement stores. These risers are ideal for people who have a hard time bending over to sit down on a toilet seat.
• Grab bars: Grab bars are easy to install and add a lot of extra stability in some important areas around the home, such as near the shower, tub and toilet.
• Cabinets: Fortunately, you shouldn’t have to do too much regarding the actual structure of your cabinets to make them more accessible, but you will definitely need to do some reorganizing. High cabinets are difficult for people in wheelchairs to reach, so you should make sure any everyday, commonly used items are in bottom cabinets so a person in a wheelchair can more easily access them.
• Floors: Remove any carpeting, rugs or other flooring that could make it difficult to operate a walker or wheelchair.

For more information about the benefits of working with a handicap accessibility contractor in Pennsylvania, contact our team at WSL Incorporated today. We look forward to assisting you.