Ways to Adapt your Home to Cope with Reduced Mobility

Changes in your physical abilities usually happen gradually over time. Stairs in your home could often bring many struggles throughout your own home to deter safety. Learn ways to adapt your home to cope with reduced mobility.

When reduced mobility becomes a daily challenge, the home you’ve enjoyed for many years may no longer be a good fit for you. Changes in your physical abilities usually happen gradually over time. This can be simply as part of growing older, but also because of an illness or accident. In either case, you could find yourself struggling to move around your own home safely and easily.  

It’s a problem many people share, so it’s no surprise that there are lots of simple adaptations that can make your home ‘user-friendly’ again. For example, if you’re a little unsteady on your feet, grab rails can be fitted around the home – anywhere that you need a helping hand or a bit of extra support. These days, many of them are stylishly designed, so your home doesn’t start to look like a clinic or hospital. In the bedroom, replacing your bed with one that stands higher off the ground, or is electrically-adjustable. This is another great way to adapt your surroundings to meet changing needs. Likewise, replacing low seating with high seat chairs or electric riser-recliners can make standing up and sitting down a great deal easier.   

When climbing in and out or your bath becomes difficult, there are various solutions including bath seats, bath lifts, or accessible ‘walk-in’ baths. If you wouldn’t miss a soak in the tub, you could even replace the bath with a large walk-in shower, complete with seating. Another good call safety-wise is installing a ‘Personal Emergency Response System’ in your home. While not strictly a home adaptation, it lets you stay living independently, but the safety net that helps is only ever the push of a button away. There are various types available and they can be a real lifeline, especially if you live alone.  

When mobility is reduced, it’s usually the stairs in your home which represent the biggest challenge and the biggest dangerous one. A fall anywhere in the home can be serious, but a fall on the stairs could be catastrophic. That’s why a home stairlift might be the most beneficial adaptation you could make. A home stairlift completely eliminates the obstacle of stairs, enabling you to move smoothly up and downstairs in safety. It means you won’t have to limit your daily journeys throughout your home. Or even avoid living and sleeping entirely on the ground floor, giving up half your home.  

The latest stairlifts are designed to blend well into a domestic setting. They deliver life-enhancing benefits and let you avoid the stress, upheaval, and cost of moving house later in life. Combined with some of the other home adaptations mentioned here, a stairlift can transform a property that has become problematic into one that fits you and your needs again.