By Carole Hawkins, [email protected]
Vince and Wendy Pessolano had a customer with a whole host of problems.
Aging and dependent on a scooter, he slept in the dining room. He hadn’t been to his upstairs bedroom in two years.
In the kitchen, he couldn’t reach into the cabinets to get a glass for water. If food was in the freezer, he wasn’t going to get it. A makeshift outdoor ramp that led up to his home was steep with no sides.
The Pessolanos’ Jacksonville company, Universal Design Solutions, did a home rehab that installed a stair lift and a new outdoor ramp.
In the kitchen they installed pull-out shelves for the base cabinets and drop-down shelves for the upper ones. They put in a side-by-side refrigerator.
Lifestyle adaptations have always come with advancing age. Walkers, wheelchairs, ramps, grab bars.
Sometime during the last decade, though, the idea of adapting a whole house emerged.
The concept is called aging in place.
“A lot of people don’t like to think they’re getting older and can’t do things,” said Wendy Pessolano. “As they age, they sometimes slide into a situation where their home becomes dangerous.”
Aging in place wasn’t seriously on the radar of the National Association of Homebuilders until 2013. But an NAHB survey has now found it is the fifth most cited reason for doing a remodel.
Aging Baby Boomers, coupled with underwater homes and limited finances, led to the surge, said Stephen Melman, NAHB director of economic services.
“People who had been planning to sell their home and move into a retirement place suddenly found the value of their home was down,” he said. “I think a lot of people decided they were just going to stay in their home and renovate it.”
Vince Pessolano, a former homebuilder and commercial design-build contractor, discovered adaptive renovation in 2002. Wendy Pessolano was a social worker and had disabled clients who needed help. There weren’t a lot of remodelers doing ramps or grab bars.
“I didn’t even realize the magnitude of this. I just kept doing it,” Vince Pessolano said.
In 2007, the couple looked back at the work they’d done, and forward to what demographics were telling them.
They had started hearing from adult children of Baby Boomers who were looking for housing solutions for their aging parents.
“That’s when we started focusing on this,” Vince Pessolano said. “We realized the curve of a wave that was coming.”
Assisted living will provide one option, but membership in such communities is more expensive than adapting one’s own home, the Pessolanos said.
Also, the demand for assisted living and nursing homes will be overwhelming.
“They aren’t going to be able to build them as fast as the incoming population ages,” Vince Pessolano said.
The adaptive renovation part of the Pessolanos’ business has grown today to over $1 million in annual revenue.
When clients first come to the Pessolanos, it’s usually because they want grab bars to get safely in and out of a tub.
The bathroom is one of the most likely places in the house for an accident that puts a person in a nursing home.
If the client uses a walker or wheelchair, they may also have trouble getting through the bathroom’s narrow doorway.
“They park the walker at the door and make a run for the vanity or the sink to balance themselves,” Vince Pessolano said. “From there it becomes bouncing around the bathroom, to whatever they can get hold of.”
Regular towel racks and toilet paper holders aren’t designed for weight. If one tears out, the person can fall.
Universal Design widens doorways and installs grab bars, pull-up sinks with no cabinet underneath, higher toilets, barrier-free showers, shower seats and hand-held shower heads.
Once a person regains access to their bathroom, they start thinking about all of the other places in their home they can’t go.
Universal Design will flatten out thresholds between doorways and home entrances as well as transitions between hard surface floors and carpet.
Kitchens are another source of problems.
“Their ability to use the room fades away,” Vince Pessolano said. “You see things migrate from the top cabinets to the countertop to the bottom to ‘Can’t do it anymore.’”
Universal Design adapts cabinets, adds extra lighting and installs front-control stoves, side-by-side refrigerators and roll-up access for sinks.
Most people think universal design means ramps and grab bars. But there are other issues aging people face that are not so obvious.
Like needing a front-loading washer and dryer.
“It’s something we wouldn’t think about because we can do it,” Wendy Pessolano said. “But, then you witness someone in that position who tells you, ‘No I can’t wash my own clothes’…. It’s a very helpless feeling that you see.”
When a person gets their independence back, it can be powerful.
“I had a lady call me, and you would have thought she won the lottery,” Wendy Pessolano said. “All we did was put in grab bars in the shower. It changed her life.”
When cost is a barrier, there are simple things that can lower a home’s danger level.
Basic bathroom safety can be had with a few grab bars, a shower chair and a hand-held shower sprayer, Wendy Pessolano said.
NAHB hasn’t specifically studied the age of people getting aging-in-place remodels.
But Melman said some other statistics suggest it’s being done more for people who need help now, rather than in the future.
A recent NAHB survey of home buying preferences shows three-fourths of baby boomers and 88 percent of seniors, the generation ahead of boomers, prefer a one story, rather than two-story home. That’s compared to 35 percent of millenial home buyers who prefer a one-story home.
The Pessolanos say they’d like to see more people planning ahead.
Faced with the issue every day, the Pessolanos have done some planning of their own. The couple will be empty nesters in a few years and are building a new home.
“Absolutely, we will be adapting it,” Vince Pessolano said.
They’ll opt for the single-story version, widen the doorways, use lots of pull-out-drawer storage and purchase age-friendly appliances.
Wendy Pessolano will also give up her “comfy cozy” carpet, which can be tripped over.
“We’re only putting it in the kids’ rooms,” she said. “Everything else is either going to be wood flooring or tile.”