Home Modification Process
- Dawn Heiderscheidt OTR/L, ECHM, CAPS
- Jan 2, 2024
- 1 min read
What happens when you hire a Home Accessibility consulting Company?
Why is an Occupational Therapist even trying to be involved in a Home Modifications project anyway?
Below is what you can expect when you hire Aurora Independence to help you complete your next renovation, especially if it's for you to stay in your home forever. There are SEVEN stages to the Home Modification process and several key players.
New Referral
In this first phase, Aurora staff will gather new information on you, your goals, and your current status regarding urgency.
Is this a fact-finding mission, or are we ready to ACT?!
During this phase, we also help identify key points of information such as medical history, diagnosis, barriers to living life to your fullest, things that are just annoying you about the current, or general pain points that motivated you to reach out in the first place. We also gather data about where you live, and if you are not within our service area, we try to connect you to a referral who CAN help.
Assessment/Evaluation
This is where the clinical knowledge of the Aurora team collaborates with you to determine YOUR goals, your desires, and the limiting factors.
We come to your house for a comprehensive evaluation. During this, we talk, a LOT, and our team aims to get a full picture of where you are, things you have tried, what worked and what didn’t. We ask a bit more about your worries for the future, or for now and we start to collaborate to figure out what solutions may exist within your budget, and that align with your readiness to make a change.
We ask questions like:
What are your medical conditions or of any who visits regularly?
When we the last time you were hospitalized (and why, and what was the outcome)?
Have you had any therapy for any injuries within the last year?
How high/low can you reach?
What does a good day look like, and what does a bad day look like
Why call us now?
Design
The design phase involves understanding the existing home environment to design a solution that fits the needs and desires of those you. You trusted us into your house, now you can trust us to give you easy action steps to follow.
This is where we take the household measurements and photos and we compile them into a comprehensive write-up. This write-up includes photos we took, product suggestions, and even to-scale drawings of your home and suggested modifications.
We consider what goals you have now, or in the future, and pay close attention to the areas which are causing the most discourse between the way you want to function in the space, and how you currently are.
Sometimes it’s a simple as implementing some space planning and reorganizing your space to function better.
And sometimes, it’s best to commit to the renovation you’ve been thinking about for a while.
We also use this time to recommend trusted partners to help you through some of the following phases.
Contractor Connections
We began with vetting contractors and sending you to people we have worked with in the past.
If you already have a contractor, that’s great! We can reach out to introduce ourselves to let them know we will be helping on the project.
Finding the right contractor to complete the project is vital. We do NOT want to make a choice based only on one set of financial standards. Home modifications are expensive, so doing it right the first time, and only time, is essential for the long-term use of your space, AND resale if you are considering it.
You want to do it RIGHT, and only once, with someone who has the skills to do so.
During this phase, you may use the at-scale drawings that were provided in the write-up to get a more detailed structural drawing from an architect or designer. Depending on who you choose as your contractor, many have those in-house. This is helpful to ensure the structural changes are done properly.
Pre-construction
We communicate as clearly as possible with the contractor about their expectations and ensure that you, as the client, are prepared for the construction journey. It can be delayed for many reasons outside of the contractor’s control, and we do our best to bridge the gaps between the realities and the expectations.
We also think about the things no one else thinks about.
What if there is only one bathroom? We may recommend a temporary toilet and shower on the property for use during the construction phase.
What if there is a lot of debris and dust from the project? May discuss additional items on the scope of work/ estimates to include air purifiers in the home to help those with respiratory concerns.
We sometimes advise/ guide clients to move out of the home, to hotel rooms, during all of our specific construction phases if the process will be too disruptive for their care.
We also help the contractor and you determine if adding a professional cleaning service post-construction is something to be included in the bid.
Construction
Some renovations have a lot of structural and labor considerations. Often, when those get prioritized, the function and accessibility can get lost or pushed to a secondary role.
This is why we like to visit the site. For short projects it may 1-2 x total For larger ones, we recommend 1x a week. We take photos, talk with the skilled laborers, and generally check in on the progress and project to ensure it is going as expected. Especially during key points of the project.
When we don’t do this, little things can get lost in translation.
For example, imagine that Aurora, you, and the contractor spend a good amount of time locating the best spot for a utility shelf in the shower. It’s a location you can reach from sitting or standing, and it doesn’t impact things like plumbing. Then, after the tile installation, you realize that while the height for reaching was perfect, the actual height of the shower niche had been reduced, and now your larger shampoo bottles, with a pump top don’t fit like we planned.
Why?
Because the tiles are 12” x 24”, or 18” x 36”, and instead of cutting into the tiles to keep the 20” niche/shelf height we requested, they thought it would be easier to just lower the overall height to 12” to match the tile size. This way they conserved on labor and time costs.
Less labor, less money right? WRONG. Now it’s hard to fit some of the very items we wanted to use for other reasons. The pump bottles that won’t fit? They aren’t a luxury, they are a necessity because you have Arthritis. After the evaluation, we determined that finding ways to reduce the many fine motor tasks you perform during the day, such as opening pop tops, jars, or zippering coats, actually helps conserve your joints for you to get back to your evening hobbies such as knitting, or painting model airplanes.
Was it the end of the world? No. But, it is something that we are Aurora Independence try to mitigate during construction processes. There was a reason we spent so much time on design!
Site visits are vitally important to catch any issues during the construction phase when they are likely easier to correct.
Post Occupancy Evaluation
When the work is completed, we make sure that you and the family are happy, and we can even walk the final punch list with you and the contractor. We want to ensure that you are trained in how to use any equipment that has been installed.
We also encourage our clients to demonstrate the use of modifications, reviewing care routines with them to make sure that you and your loved ones will be happy and safe in the new environment. Sometimes, when we do modifications, the routines you used to use, need to change. And that adjustment sometimes takes a skilled professional to help ease the transition and encourage practice.
When you engage an accessibility consulting company to help you with your renovation project, it ensures that you have an extra set of eyes that is bridging the gap between the construction world your accessibility needs, and the very real change that occurs throughout a project.
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