The #1 Reason we Needed an Interior Designer
We had no idea what we were doing.
Really.
We thought that all we had to do was hire a contractor, and our contractor was great and he would've built whatever we told him to build. We would've been wrong. The drawing above is confirmation.
I did that drawing and this one about a year before we found our home. I had already been searching for a long time. I would look at a house and try to figure out how I could create a bathroom that would accommodate Katherine. Finally Barry said, "just draw her bathroom the way you think it ought to be."
I would move the 5' turn radius circle around the "room" because that's the ADA law. Katherine really needs more space than that, but I didn't take that into account. Even though Barry had theoretically given me limitless space, I couldn't help but try to condense it.
I had it in my head that it was critical to have open space on each side of the toilet for Katherine's chair and a caregiver on the other side. I wanted to make it so she could drive up to either side of the toilet because I wasn't sure which side would be easier for her to transfer from. (There was no place to practice where she could drive up right next to the toilet!)
All of our design ideas included a bathtub because Katherine loves taking a bath so much. In this option, I felt it was critical that the caregiver be able to get to her head... I don't know why.
When we did find our home, and knew how much space was available our tactic changed. We asked Barry's brother Jered who is a design engineer to come out from Colorado to help us talk through the process. Then our design started looking more like this:
We had access to the architectural drawings of the house, and the previous owners let Jered and I do a walk through - even though we hadn't closed on the house yet. During Jered's stay, Barry researched and found the Pressalit Bathing Table that we'll talk more about later. It became a cornerstone of our design.
It is hard to see in this rendering, but I still had a toilet out in the middle of the room so that Katherine could drive all around it. Jered had the idea to move the sink behind the toilet because that was the last thing you would do in the toileting process. This made sense, but it did put the sink in the bedroom.
Jered did help us talk through how we dreamed about taking care of Katherine, what would be ideal... She would go potty, then take a bath, then dry off somewhere other than her floor or her bed, and she would get dressed for the day. We started talking through the idea of using a lift, and how the track for the lift would need to move to accommodate each of these steps.
That drawing was hard for me to wrap my head around, so I built this:
The Legos are supposed to represent Katherine's wheelchair and a caregiver...
In this rendering I could draw the turns of the ceiling track and begin to understand how the space would work.
Underneath the mess above, you can almost see our first copy of The Accessible Home by Deborah Pierce. It was in this book that we first saw the name Stephanie Gilboy. Then we met her by chance at the plumbing store, then she looked at our -what we thought were -magnificent plans, and she helped us build a suite for Katherine that was more lovely and functional than we could've imagined.
Stephanie had the education and knowledge to guide us through the entire process. She understood all the little pieces and parts of plumbing that I had no idea I even needed. She spent hours researching decor and walking through tile and countertop choices with me, and she understood how it was all going to fit together. She talked to the contractors about any concerns I had in a language they understood, and forced the electrician to squeeze in way more can lights than they wanted to in Katherine’s complicated ceiling.
Thank you Stephanie for making Katherine’s room so much better than it would’ve been!
