Renovating for a parent who's moving in: who gets to decide
You're renovating the spare room, the basement, or the second unit, and your mother or father is moving into it. You hold the budget, you're talking to the contractor, and you're the one searching at eleven at night. Everything you find is written for you, the caregiver.
This is written for you too, with one difference. The person who has to live in that room is your parent, and the room turns out better when they're the one answering the questions. Here's why, and how to do it without it turning into a fight.
What happens when they're not in the room
There's research on this, from objects rather than houses. In one survey of 227 adults with disabilities, nearly three in ten assistive devices had been abandoned, and one of the four things linked to abandonment was that the user's opinion wasn't considered when the device was chosen.¹ Ask someone what they need and they use it. Decide for them and it goes in a closet.
A room is a bigger object. If your father didn't choose the walk-in shower, he showers somewhere else, or he stops showering as often, and you paid for a bathroom that does less than it cost. Nobody will say this out loud. It happens quietly, the way the upstairs bathroom in any house stops being used.
What "they decide" means in practice
It doesn't mean your parent picks the tile or reads the quotes. It means three things are theirs to answer, and you write down the answers before anyone draws anything.
1. What part of the day is hard now. Not their diagnosis, and not what the doctor said. Ask which rooms in their current house they've stopped going into, and why. Ask what they do when both hands are full. Ask what they can't reach anymore. Three sentences from them are worth more than any checklist you'll find online, because they're about their body and not a generic one.
2. What has to stay possible. Sitting down to cook. Getting outside without asking. A door that closes. Their own coffee maker. Ask what they'd be most annoyed to lose, and treat those answers as requirements, not preferences.
3. What it should look like. They've had a house of their own for fifty years. They have opinions about a bathroom. If the room is planned so it works on a bad day and looks like a place they chose, they'll use it. If it looks like the clinic, they'll use it as little as they can.
You hold everything else: the budget, the dates, the contractor, the drawings, which walls can move. That's plenty.
How to have the conversation
Walk their current house with them, room by room, before you plan the new one. Doorway by doorway, ask: is this hard? Watch what they reach for when they stand up. Notice which light switches they don't use.
Write it down in their words. "I don't go in the tub anymore" goes on the list as written. Later, that sentence becomes a shower with no step and a place to sit. But the sentence comes first, and it's theirs.
Then show them the list and ask what you got wrong. You'll have gotten something wrong.
The decisions that close early
Whatever the answers, some things about the new room are nearly free while it's still a drawing and expensive once the wall is built:
Which floor the room and its bathroom are on. If it's up a flight of stairs, the stairs are part of the room.
How wide the doors are. Thirty-six inches leaves room for a walker, and a wider door costs almost nothing on the order.
Wood behind the bathroom walls, wherever a hand might go when standing up, so a grab bar can go in later without opening the wall.
A shower with no step, which is a decision about where the drain goes, made before the plumber arrives.
Where the light switches are, and whether there's one you can reach from the bed.
None of these need your parent's approval. They need to be on the drawing before the drawing is approved. That part is yours.
When they can't answer
Sometimes the person can't take part in the conversation anymore. Then you answer for the person they were: what they liked, what they hated, what they'd have chosen for themselves. That's still better than a generic answer, and it's the honest version of "they decide" when deciding isn't available.
Where to start
Start with the walk through their current house. Then the free guide, The Decisions Your Renovation Makes Without You, tells you which of the things you wrote down close at each stage of the renovation. It's short and set in large print, and it has a page for the person planning on someone else's behalf. Sign up and the download is yours.
¹ Phillips B, Zhao H. Predictors of assistive technology abandonment. Assistive Technology. 1993;5(1):36–45.
