We were in our fifties when we had to leave our 2-story home with living quarters upstairs, office and laundry downstairs. Hauling groceries, firewood and ash, laundry, furniture etc was good exercise but hard on knees. (We really worked to get our church organ up the stairs.)
We designed our current 1-level modular home with aging in mind: low-rise wide-tread outside steps with 2, 3, and 4 feet ascents, the lowest set for ramp conversion; walk-in shower with seat; no fucking fireplace. Had we kept the 2-story place, we’d have dug into savings to retrofit an elevator (there was space and support for it).
Our 2-foot-high side-door steps face a clear 40-foot line along the house for a 1:20 slope so we’re set there. The covered side porch will need to be expanded slightly to fit wheelchairs if needed, hopefully in the far future.
You’ve received many good suggestions. I’ll go with this: if you can’t retrofit power lifts, it’s best to move into a single-level house. Ranch style; mid-century modern; modular; pre-fab. (My old desert cinderblock jackrabbit shack sat on a concrete slab with front, side, and back door rises of 3 inches.) Any of these are suitable.
I have received many good suggestions here, yes. Thank you to everybody.
The more I look at things the more convinced I become that a ramp is not a real possibility.
I do believe that by installing about 40’ of elevated straight walkway, starting with a deck at the front door, continuing along the front wall of the house, and extending a few feet beyond the end of the house, we could reach an access to the driveway. There would be space there to have a lift that would travel 10’ vertically. There would be some excavation. Our electrical power and cable internet & phone is buried there but I suppose either the walkway could extend further, or maybe we could move those utilities. I don’t like that this walkway would be immediately adjacent to my bedroom window, so the first thing strangers would see is a full view of the bedroom, but maybe some stained glass windows would fix that (at the cost of being able to look outside).
It’s hard to see how Ms. Napier could enter on the lower floor. We’d have to convert the sliding glass door to a door one can unlock from the outside, but then the stairway between basement and living floor is pretty narrow. The top of the stairs is a laundry area that is too small as it is, and a tight U turn through a door and between cabinets to get into the kitchen. It’s hard to imagine maneuvering a wheelchair through all this even if the stair lift took up no space except for the size of a small chair, and that’s with having wheelchairs kept at the top and bottom of the stairs. For years now, the basement has been exclusively my space, and she stomps on the floor when she wants me, never coming down here at all.
But the idea of buying a different house is frankly just horrifying. We are trying to make it through a bathroom facelift, where we’re replacing the fixtures, furniture, paint, and flooring. We’re not changing anything about the functionality or content or layout of the bathroom, just replacing old stuff with new stuff. She’s frantic, having anxiety attacks, having stress symptoms in her chronic diseases, and yelling bitter recriminations pretty much every day – and the contractor hasn’t even started yet, he starts first thing tomorrow morning. And this is all for the bathroom I use, not her bathroom. The idea of making a significant change to the house just seems prohibitively difficult. Choosing a new home seems flat out impossible. It’s hard to even try to push my thinking ahead on this; I just want to put my head in the sand. Though people tell me that’s not as successful as I might wish, for preventing aging.