Remodeling for Safety: The Bathroom

As Boomers age, we're helping our parents deal with livability issues. All too soon, we'll be dealing with these issues for ourselves and our spouses. Some of us — the "early aged," who have some sort of injury or debilitating condition — are already dealing with these challenges.

This is the first of a series of articles that will look at how you can modify a home to fit the needs of someone who is growing older — whether that person is your parent, your spouse, or you. This article focuses on the bathroom. I'll take a look at a typical bathroom design and highlight the areas that are likely to be problems for someone with age-related disabilities. You'll learn how you can redesign a bathroom to be safer — but still look like it belongs in a home, not a hospital.

Home is where the heart is

If you aren't familiar with the term "aging in place," it simply means your parents' ability to stay in the home they know and love as they grow older. As you can imagine, that's going to require some changes to the house. You're probably envisioning grab bars, walkers, and those thick plastic booster seats that sit on top of the toilet. But the concept of aging in place entails much more. It involves issues from saving money by residing in independent housing to creating living spaces that match your parents' lifestyle of today, not their lifestyle of 25 years ago. Aging in place is about creating a living space that supports them, or at least minimizes the demands that age places on their abilities. With care and planning, you can do this via many artful solutions instead of slapdash measures.