I sympathize with the family and understand they need special access for their home. But why not put a ramp inside the garage and use the garage entrance? Or at least plant shrubs (azaleas or something) to hide that butt ugly gray concrete. There’s even a cultured stone product that can be applied that would give texture and earth tone color to that concrete.
Theres a house on my street with a disabled person. Their ramp is integrated into a deck at the rear of the home. You can’t even tell it’s there just driving by.
I understand they have a right to the ramp. But shouldn’t they be expected to do it in a more eye appealing way?
Nope. There are no shortages of covenant controlled communities here in Colorado. If the neighbors wanted a say in what their neighbors houses looked like, they should have chosen one of those. The family met the legal requirements and consulted with the city about it. If the neighbors want something nicer looking, then they can talk to the family and offer to pay for it. Otherwise they should shut up and deal with it.
I know you didn’t mean it this way but you do understand this sounds dangerously close to telling black people to use the back enterance back in the day?
Oh my goodness! Have the neighbours nothing better to do than complain about that? It’s a ramp… it’s for a person who can’t use stairs. How shallow and mean-minded does one have to be to find that offensive to look at?
No one is questioning the need for the ramp. But there are ways of incorporating it so that it doesn’t bring down property values. Right now it’s very stark and commercial looking. Would you spend 350k for a new house across the street from this one? I sure wouldn’t.
Hedges are a good idea.
here’s the street view I mentioned earlier. I wish they had used that same brick veneer that’s already on the house.
That is a perfectly fine-looking ramp, particularly for a region which gets the occasional snowfall. I’d be concerned about somebody trying to navigate a snow-covered ramp in winter if it weren’t sturdy, with strong grab-rails all along.
If the neighbors are that concerned about the look, perhaps they can pool their resources and provide a shrubbery or something to shield their delicate eyes.
While I’ll agree with the neighbors that it is a butt-ugly installation, I don’t see that they will have any leg to stand on getting anything done about it.
They’d be better off and cheaper done offering to pay to have an attractive facing applied to it.
Wow, that has got to be the most depressing example of complete self-absorption I’ve seen in a while. What a useless bunch of people.
What’s worse is the ramp doesn’t even look that bad. It’s clean, proportional, made of normal building materials, etc. The wheelchair ramp outside of my grandmother’s house looks a hundred times uglier. But considering that they cost a couple thousand bucks, decorating it isn’t really a priority.
If I were the family involved, I’d paint the whole thing pink.
For real. What’s ugly here is the nasty group of people that call themselves neighbors. I wanted to reply earlier but I was stunned into silence by the scale of the douchebaggery.
And no, a disabled person need not creep round the back for fear of offending someone’s delicate sensibilities. They have the right – the legal right, as well as the moral right – to come and go in a way convenient for them.
That looks like a pretty awesome wheelchair ramp to me. It wouldn’t fit in the garage, at least not without filling it up. It looks like they have made a little area to plant something along the side, which will look nicer. I wouldn’t expect “pretty” to be anywhere near top priority in budgeting for a project like this. They can always add extra features later. The neighbors are assholes for complaining.
That’s what I think. There are requirements that neighbours have to meet even in non-controlled neighbourhoods, but that’s for things like weed control, grass length, cleaning snow off sidewalks, etc., not for disallowing people to put necessary, legal wheelchair ramps up.
They don’t sound at all like neighbors – at least not in the “love your neighbor as yourself” sense. More like fellow homeowners.
“Neighbors” would get together and offer to help the family with landscaping, etc. having a disabled 16 yr old daughter can’t be easy and some understanding and genuine concern that translated into real help would go a long way from turning a group of homeowners into a neighborhood.
