Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

We've bought a fixer-upper. A skeleton of a house. Literally. We will keep the posts the house is standing on and, hopefully, the siding. It's a pole-house, leveraged off the side of a hill. Everything else must/will go. The disgusting original appliances and fixtures (which, if they were in good condition would be hipster collector's items), the carpets (OMG), the leaky roof, doors, and windows, the unsafe decks (the engineer freaked out -- just as well we have liability insurance), and, if the city prevails, the unpermitted second floor (please, no!). On the upside, all of this means, that we now have the opportunity to design and build a wheelchair accessible house -- from the ground up.

I have been in commercial accessible space, institutional accessible space, the homes of other wheelchair users which they have made accessible, loft space (basically accessible, but the bathrooms can be tricky) and one "built from the ground up accessible" house (it felt weirdly like an institution), but we're not experts in universal design by any means: we hired an architect to make sure that we didn't miss anything. Mr. A's first question was did we want a truly universally accessible house or "just" something I could roll around in comfortably? That seemed to be such a principled decision that he rephrased -- what do we have to do for me to be able to do the things I do?

One place we compromised was the kitchen. I need to be able to boil the kettle and reach the fridge and the microwave. I occasionally make salad, but I am not a chef on the same scale as Wizard. I would rather go miles out of my way than begin to assemble a meal from ingredients in the fridge and the cupboards (what *does* one do with flour, anyway?). The bathroom was one place we did not compromise. I like bathing. I like water. I can hide in the tub for hours. And at the end of a hard dance day, I need a bath. We ended up working from the standpoint of how can the architecture of the house invisibly support my body. This perspective has meant that stuff is designed in. The bench on the backside of the bed headboard? Transfer height. The shower? Built in seating all around the shower and all the shower head and body spray thingies are designed to work at either seated or standing height. The level changes between garage, downstairs bedroom, hall will be smoothed out, etc., etc. Doors will become "lightweight pocket doors." An automated sensor system will take care of light and temperature regulation (operable from computer or, possibly, cellphone -- Wizard is a techno-geek).

I'm not sure what's next. The drawings seem to be mostly done. We're submitting permits next week to the city. And from then on? Well, who knows. I've never built a house before. Everyone tells us horror stories about construction, but we're not sure of the complications accessibility modifications might bring. Technically, disability specs should be no different from any other type of construction spec -- after all, people often ask for the weirdest things in their homes. That said, I suspect there aren't many companies that have experience with disability modifications. And that means there will be one or two accessibility hiccups on the way.

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