Last Tuesday Greg came up from the downstairs bathroom and said, "That toilet is too low for a grown man." He's said this before. The difference this time is that we've just decided to stay in this house for the long haul, so I went and measured it. Fifteen inches from the floor to the top of the seat. The standard height for an accessible toilet is around seventeen to nineteen.
A little background. In August we had two realtors come through to talk about whether we should sell our 1977 split-level and buy something on one floor. They were both nice, and both gave us numbers that made me think. But when we added up what it would cost to sell, buy and move, and then looked at what we'd get for the money in our area, we decided to stay, at least for now, and make this house work for us as we get older.
"For now" in our house could mean twenty years. I'm 56, Greg is 59. So I made a list of small changes we could make this fall while we're still healthy enough to do them without a crisis forcing our hand.
The bathroom changes
Most of the risk in a house for older people is in the bathroom, according to everything I read. Wet floors, getting up from low seats, getting in and out of a tub. We have two full bathrooms upstairs and a half bath on the bottom level.
Here's what we did:
- Grab bars: three of them. One next to the toilet in the upstairs hall bath, one inside the tub-shower in the same bathroom, one in our bathroom. Stainless, 24 inches long, $32 each. A handyman installed them into studs for $180 total, because I wasn't going to trust a grab bar to my own drywall anchors.
- A raised toilet seat with handles for the downstairs half bath: $46. It clamps on, no tools. Greg says it's "better," which is the most I'll get.
- A shower seat that fits in our tub: $39.
- A handheld shower head on a slide bar for the upstairs hall bath: $58.
- Non-slip mats inside both tubs and a rubber-backed rug outside: $34.
Bathroom total: $517 including the handyman. Not nothing, but a broken hip would cost much more, and I'm not just talking about money.
Lever handles instead of knobs
This one I'd never thought about until a realtor mentioned it. Round doorknobs are hard to turn if your hands get stiff or you're carrying something. Lever handles you can push down with an elbow.
We have fourteen interior doors in this house, counting closets. I priced lever sets at about $14 each for basic passage handles and $19 for privacy handles on the bathrooms and bedrooms. We replaced all fourteen over two Saturdays: eight passage, six privacy. That came to $226.
Greg did most of it, with the radio on and Biscuit supervising from the hallway. Each door took about fifteen minutes once he got the hang of it. The first one took an hour and some language I won't repeat here.
We also replaced the front door knob and deadbolt with a lever set and keyed deadbolt for $68, and put a lever handle on the door from the garage. Coming in from the garage with groceries is now much easier.
The smaller things on the list
A few more changes that cost very little:
We moved the everyday dishes from the top cabinet to a lower one, so neither of us needs a step stool to reach them. I bought a reacher-grabber tool for $15 that I use more than I expected. We added the last two motion-sensor night lights to the hallway outside our bedroom for $16, completing the stair lighting project from last year. And we replaced the old shower curtain rod in the hall bath with a curved one that gives more elbow room, $24.
What it all cost
Here's the total from the green notebook for this round:
Bathroom changes $517. Interior lever handles $226. Front and garage door hardware $68 plus $31. Small items $55. Grand total: $897.
For perspective, one realtor said a typical move would cost us around 8 to 10 percent of the sale price once you add commissions, closing costs and movers. On our house that's tens of thousands of dollars. Spending $897 to stay put more comfortably felt like a bargain.
I'm not saying we'll never move. Our knees will get the final vote. But I'd rather make these changes calmly now than in a hurry after a fall. Next on the list, maybe next year: a walk-in shower downstairs. That one gets its own savings line, right after the roof.
