Being confined to a wheelchair can make life a fair deal more difficult, and there is no getting around that, despite the fact that, thanks to wheelchair ramps and other similar inventions, creating a home that is wheelchair accessible just couldn’t be easier. If you, or any member of your family, relies on a wheelchair to get around, ensuring your home/their home is fully accessible, is absolutely vital, not just for convenience reasons, but also for health and safety reasons in the process. Our homes are full of hazards and potential hazards, and when wheelchair usage is considered, ensuring we do all we can to avoid these hazards is absolutely vital. If you’re intending on creating a wheelchair accessible home, take a look at the following useful tips and life will become much easier for all parties involved.
Install Wheelchair Ramps
When it comes to wheelchairs, wheelchair ramps, also known as wheelchair access ramps, are absolutely essential, and are arguably the most important items to consider. In any parts of the home with steps and/or steep inclines, wheelchair ramps must be installed to provide the wheelchair user with easy access to and from various parts of their home. To some people a front door step is no big deal, but for a wheelchair user, a doorstep is the equivalent of a prison or dead end. Replacing steps with wheelchair ramps however, ensures that these needn’t be issues.
Install Stair Lifts
Ideally, for anybody confined to a wheelchair, a bungalow is considered much safer and much more practical, but sometimes, for one reason or another, this just isn’t possible. To help make life much safer when getting up and downstairs, you should have an electric stair lift installed, which will basically grant the wheelchair user access up and downstairs, without putting them in harm’s way.
Replace Carpets with Hard Floors
There are a number of reasons to consider replacing a carpeted floor with a hard floor, but the most important reason is simply the fact that carpeted floors can be much harder to navigate across in wheelchair, than a hard floor. The thicker the carpet, the harder it will be for the wheels to gain traction, which is obviously not what you want. You will want to get from room to room as easily as possible, and by replacing carpeted floors with hard floors such as wooden floors or vinyl floors, you will be able to do just that. On top of that, cleaning hard floors is much easier than cleaning carpeted floors, so again, go with hard floor instead of carpet or thick rugs.
Change Door Handles
This is another very simple thing to do, yet many of us don’t ever consider doing it until it is too late. When confined to a wheelchair, a person is obviously much lower to the ground, so reaching door handles and door knobs that are placed higher up on doors will be much harder. By simply having the knobs and handles lowered a few inches however, wheelchair users can easily reach them.