There are three of us. My mom lives with us as well and her mobility has been significantly decreasing rapidly. As a matter of fact, we’re waiting for a rollator/wheelchair combo to get here this coming weekend for her. However, she has no need to go upstairs as her bedroom is the one that was the library on the first floor.
I appreciate all of the feedback and also letting me know where I missed the mark regarding the music, too!
My father needed a wheelchair to get around the last five years or so, but fortunately, the house my parents bought some decades prior was a single-story ranch house, with only a small step up from the garage level. So for the most part, he was able to get around, though the hallways and doorways suffered some dings from the chair.
Honestly I wish more houses were built to be accessible by someone in a wheelchair. Out of boredom, I tried to search real estate listings for this but very few.
About 25 years ago, my mother-in-law and her husband moved out of a two-story Cape Cod, and into a ranch house, in Chicago’s southwest suburbs. That house was purpose-built for a family which had a handicapped child, and it was 100% wheelchair accessible (other than the unfinished basement): wide doorways, zero-height thresholds, no steps into the house, etc.
It would have been an absolutely ideal age-in-place house, but about 10 years ago, my MIL decided she wanted to move. Part of it was that she has always had “grass is greener” tendencies, and is never happy where she is, but the other part of it is that, frankly, she’s a quiet racist (though she’d insist otherwise), and wasn’t comfortable that the neighborhood was becoming more diverse.
They bought a townhouse. The only full bathroom (and both bedrooms) are up a full flight of stairs, while the laundry and utilities are in the basement. When she bought it, she was in her early 70s, and my wife said to her, “Mom, what are you thinking, with all of those stairs??” Her response: “Oh, those will help me stay active.” Which, maybe they did, until they didn’t, and now she is pretty much confined to the main floor.
As my wife and I have talked about moving into a ranch, we’ve joked about looking into seeing if we could buy that ranch house…but maybe we weren’t entirely joking.
I love older homes; ours is a 95 year old Tudor. I’ve been following the thread thinking that we’ll be making this decision some years down the line; my husband and I are 66, active and healthy. We bike and hike and ski.
But all of that changed on Friday when I had a ski accident and right now I’m dealing with crutches, 2 injured knees (a sprain in one, and a possible ACL and/or MCL tear in the other), painful bruises, and painkillers.
We have a room on our ground floor which has a small powder room and foldout couch–but the foldout mechanism broke a few months ago. Dragging myself up the stairs on my butt was not fun. It really drove home the point that our house isn’t sustainable for us when we get old. We have a shower in the basement and a full bathroom upstairs, but nowhere to shower/bathe on the ground floor.
That’s the thing. Any of us can go from completely ambulatory to temporarily or permanently disabled in an instant. I knew someone who had a slip-and-fall while getting out of his car on a January day about a decade ago. He stepped on a small patch of ice, went down hard and was a quadriplegic from that day forward.
Well that took an unexpected turn. I hope you recover very soon.
A different perspective on stairs: since you are 52 or so, and are expecting to have your knee(s) replaced, you shouldn’t have to abandon a house you love for another 20 to 30 years because of stairs. My parents moved to a one-level house in their late 60s, and they both deteriorated seriously after that. I am convinced that it was at least partly due to lack of physical effort and exercise in their lives. Stairs take effort, they are supposed to take effort, and putting out that effort will help your whole body. You don’t have to run up and down, take your time and make sure you don’t fall, but keep putting out that effort.
This is my non-medically-based point of view. Our house has two levels, plus another set of stairs to get down to the back yard (and my shop in the basement). I’m 76 with arthritis in my hip, but I’m not interested in moving until I absolutely have to. I expect that by then I will be in the last stages of whatever is going to kill me. Until then, I will be pushing myself up and down those stairs, and feeling better for it.
I can’t advise you on the economics or the rest of the stuff, but I urge you to consider twice before writing stairs out of your life. (edited to add) time enough to move if there is some accident or other reason you just can’t do stairs. Most people go through their lives without that sort of thing happening.