10th Edition
Welcome to the 10th edition of the house hunting update! Since my last update where I found 2 accessible homes, I’ve managed to book two additional viewings. This update shall take you through my recent house viewing – the house came up very recently while briefly looking on a Friday evening. So was this house a winner or another unsuitable house?
The Property
Since the house was a family home, it had a great open plan area downstairs with plenty of room for a kitchen, dining room and living room in one. There was also access to a utility room, and office, with upstairs giving access to 3 decent-sized bedrooms and a bathroom. As for the garden, it had pretty elevated land which would have needed a lot of work to be made suitably accessible.
An honourable mention goes out to the excellent-sized driveway. Out of all the houses I’ve seen so far, this had the widest and most spacious driveway of them all with space for up to 3 reasonably sized vehicles to park up on.
Potential Adaptions
What came to mind was the potential to install a wet room downstairs to enable accessible showering. The office was also ideal since this could be turned into a downstairs bedroom giving more accessibility options. However, when it came to upstairs, it just made it impractical to make the house accessible due to the lack of space.
The Problem with Houses
The majority of houses are unsuitable for disabled people due to the fact they come with stairs. While lifts serve as a solution to this problem the house needs to be able to support the lift in the first place. There is also the added cost to install, insure and maintain a lift to ensure you can always have access to a working lift.
The Need for Universally Accessible Housing
Even though older houses may not be as accessible, we must encourage more universally accessible housing to be built. Everyone deserves somewhere to call their home, so why not create housing that can be adapted and changed easily to suit the needs of the property’s occupants? I discussed the need for more homes with accessibility built into their design in an earlier post which you can find here.
Until Next Viewing
No luck this time but the house/bungalow hunting continues! I hope that the perfect home comes up soon but I’m still in no rush. Please consider sharing your thoughts in the comments below or submitting a guest post. Alternatively, if you would like to have an anonymous chat, you can also send me an email at info@buildmyaccessiblehome.co.uk.
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