Our Accessible Home || Bathrooms

Hello! Our family and our accessible home was recently featured in the March 2022 issue of Better Homes & Gardens. I’ve been sharing about our home over the years and I’m finally doing a full house tour to share all the details about our home and specifically about what makes our home accessible. You can read more about our family here.

I’m excited to finally be sharing our accessible bathrooms! But of course there is more than one way to do an accessible bathroom and I had 10 people who shared their bathrooms in 2 previous posts. You can see part 1 here, and part 2 here.

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Our home has 4 full bathrooms–2 on each floor. We wanted to make sure that there was an accessible bathroom on each floor. The black and white bathroom also doubles as our guest bathroom, while the pink bathroom is Lamp and Zuzu’s primary bathroom.

Pink Bathroom
I borrowed the design of this bathroom from a random photo I saw on Pinterest. We have a midcentury home, but all the midcentury–except for the exterior–was gutted from the home sometime in the 80’s, and since there was nothing truly worth saving on the interior style wise we gutted the home again. This bathroom was a nod to the pink bathrooms of the midcentury era, with a modern twist.

Here are the main components of accessibility needed in the pink bathroom:

1) A large, open space (approx. 5 feet turning radius) so that Lamp can easily maneuver her chair in the bathroom.
2) Grab bars around the toilet, a fold down transfer bench and a washlet bidet.
3) Grab bars and a fold down bench in the shower.
4) Two separate shower heads, one of them a hand-held shower head on a slide down bar so that it can mounted lower. Also, lower control valves so she can easily turn the shower on/off independently.
5) Lower vanity with room to sit on top. Unlike most wheelchair users, Lamp does not usually need a roll under sink and so we had custom dual height vanity made. Additionally the sinks are off set to the left, so that she can sit on the right side of the sink to brush her teeth, wash her feet/hands/face if needed. She also stays in her chair to use the vanity as well.
6) A single handle faucet that is much easier for her to turn on/off and control the temperature with one hand. Accessible storage.
7) We ended up turning the drawer pulls upside down as it’s much easier for her to pull from a top-down position, rather than reaching up and under.

Black Bathroom
First, I want to acknowledge that I stole, I mean borrowed this design from a bathroom that Sarah Sherman Samuel did a few years ago. Specifically, I loved the white herringbone tile with the black hex floor pattern.

As for accessibility in this bathroom it is mainly focused on:
1) Grab bars around the toilet, a fold down transfer bench and a washlet bidet.
2) Grab bars in the shower with a fold down bench.
3) A large, open space (approx/ 5′) for a generous turning radius.

Since this isn’t Lamp’s main bathroom I didn’t worry too much about the other aspects being accessible, but if I could back I would do this bathroom differently, as I also want to ensure this bathroom has a more general accessibility for any guests we might have who are also wheelchair users. While most of the bathroom would work really well for a wheelchair user, I wish I had a roll under sink, with a single handle faucet. However, I purchased this vanity and the faucet early on in the building process and felt like I had to use it once I had purchased it. But again, if I could go back this is the one major change I’d make in this room. Additionally, I still would like to install a grab bar with a sliding hand held shower head in the shower..

But most importantly, both of these bathrooms work so well for our entire family! As much as I love traveling to other places, and visiting friends and family, one of the biggest things we notice when we’re not in our house, is how much more work it is outside of our accessible home.

Which means I am so grateful to know that our home works well for our family! As I’ve said a million times, accessibility gives to everyone and takes from no one. Because we spent SO MUCH timing thinking about accessibility upfront in the planning and building phase, there is a lot more ease built in to our day-to-day life on this side of the renovation.

It was 1,000% worth it.

Tip: For anyone wanting to stay in their home forever, installing blocking in the bathroom walls around the toilet and in the shower would be my #1 biggest tip. It’s not expensive to include it before hand, but would be super expensive and less sustainably down the road as you would need to rip out the walls to install. You can put guard rails into the studs, but not only do you severely limit where you can put your grab bars, it’s still a risk as you might not hit the stud directly in the middle with the screw. Additionally, if you do install blocking TAKE PHOTOS and make a record of the height. Even though we installed grab bars and benches right away, I still wish I knew exactly where the blocking was in our house incase we ever needed to add a bar or change things around.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments below! I’d love to answer anything  I can. 
XO, 

Miggy