Need to make your home more accessible? Are you looking for ways to adapt your home but feeling a bit panicked by the potential costs?

Making a property more accessible for people living with reduced mobility can wildly enhance their independence and quality of life. But there are so many options, it can be difficult to know where to start.

Carry on reading for our top tips on how to start making your house comfortable for everyone.  

What Adaptations Are Available For Domestic Settings?

If you’re new to the world of home adaptations, or even if you’re not, your mind might summon images of medical-looking facilities and equipment. You might think that some of the changes are restricted to clinical environments, but in fact, many can be implemented at home.

Adaptations can range in cost, degree of permanency and timescale of installation or completion. We’ve listed our top tips for making your home accessible according to their level of investment.

Low-Cost Adaptations

Let’s take a look at some of the changes you can easily implement in your home with little cost.

Grab Rails

Grab rails provide that much-needed extra support for people with limited mobility and, these days, come in a huge range of styles and materials to suit all homes. From sleek wood to striking colours – particularly helpful for users with poor eyesight – grab rails are cheap, widely available and easy to install. 

Shower Seat

If replacing the shower or bath isn’t possible at the moment, consider adding a shower seat to your set-up. This can help with stability for people who are unsteady in the shower. For a shower seat, it’s vital to prep before fitting by checking the wall for proper support, as well as installing the chair at the correct height for the user. We always advise getting a professional to install gadgets and equipment.

New Taps

Taps might not have been the first thing to spring to mind, but they’re a relatively easy replacement to make in the bathroom or kitchen. And much cheaper than a whole bathroom refit, for example.

Whether you opt for lever taps or luxury sensor versions for touch-free operation, a new set of fixtures could revolutionise washing and self-care in the home.

Light Switches & Plug Sockets

Consider moving the position of your light switches and sockets so they are within comfortable reach. You can even get an electrician to fit motion-sensor light fittings throughout your home for total simplicity of use.

Adding A Shower Screen Or Accessible Curtain

Whilst shower screens can work into the hundreds, accessible shower curtains are not only safer but much kinder to the purse strings. Specially designed shower curtains are made of durable, heavy materials and are weighted at the base for extra structure. For more detail, read this blog. 

Temporary Ramps

Concrete and modular ramps are pretty hefty investments, but have you considered buying a temporary wheelchair ramp? Not only can they be used with immediate effect and moved around with ease, but they can be helpful for visitors using walking aids and even pushchairs and prams, too. 

Motorised Blinds And Doors

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. Automating your window coverings is so beneficial; it reduces the stress your body has to go through during the day. Doors are likely to be more expensive, it’s true, but this adaptation is still on the low-cost end of the scale, and the benefits are massive.

Mid-Range Adaptations

Now we’re onto the changes that cost that bit more AND require more prep, construction and input from teams of professionals.

Wider Doorways

Changing the width of the doorways means users have more space to easily move around their home, with less chance of bumping into doorframes. Magically, the process also creates the illusion of more space in your home and can look quite stunning. 

Widening doorways takes a bit longer because brickwork needs to be removed, and then the decor is re-touched to match the rest of the rooms. The price of the job depends on the number of doors involved, whether they’re internal or external and whether the wall is solid or made of timber. 

Stairlifts

Stairlifts transport a single user up and down their flight of stairs. The user sits safely on the chair, which moves along a rail that is either fixed to the wall or stair treads. Stairlifts range in price depending on track length and the number of curves, so you’re looking at somewhere between £3k and £7k.

New Toilet

Wall-hung toilets and washer-dryer toilets are both brilliantly accessible alternatives to the standard loo because they can be set at a height to suit the user and offer a paperless, hygienic toileting experience. They’re easy to keep clean, too. These come in at £3k – £6k, depending on the model and extras. 

For more on accessible bathrooms, have a read through our comprehensive guide.

Concrete Or Modular Ramps

Concrete ramps are one way to go. But we’re all about the modular ramp at the John Ford Group. Modular ramps are built to last but can be built on top of any landscape, altered and moved easily and recycled or sold after use. You can read more about the benefits of modular ramps in this recent blog. 

Temporary Shower Pod 

Not ready or able to re-do your bathroom but need an accessible washing solution? Are you or a loved one struggling to get upstairs to the bathroom? Check out our temporary shower pods. Easily erected in a single day, they can be installed in a downstairs room of the house and cost £6,000 for both the pod and installation. Find out more about them here.

Large Investment Adaptations

Here we go – these are the big ones. The following domestic changes and equipment additions are costly, and some of them take longer to get up and running. 

Wet Room

Wet rooms are fully waterproof bathrooms with an open shower area. Depending on the size of the bathroom to be converted, a wet room can cost anywhere up to around £10k. The pricing comes down to the square meterage of the space, as well as the quality of the products and the addition of any new facilities, including underfloor heating.

Through-Floor Lift

Through-floor lifts, or TFLs, work like the elevator in your local Asda. But for a single person. And it’s not hard to see why installing a lift in your home might be expensive. Not only is the product itself on the larger side and technical, but there’s quite a bit of prep work needed. Prices for TFLs start at around £11,000. 

Kitchen Refit

Adapting a whole kitchen to make it more accessible can include installing new worktops, moving and replacing appliances, changing the flooring, widening doorways and swapping the sink for a wall-hung, shallow version. Because this can involve significant structural changes, and sometimes the disabling of the electrical or plumbing system, your new kitchen might not be usable for a good couple of weeks. To install an accessible kitchen, you can expect to spend between £8 and £15k. 

Hydrotherapy Pool
Hydrotherapy can vastly improve physical movement and general health and well-being and can be used to ease the symptoms of many physical and neurological conditions. Adding a hydrotherapy pool to a home usually means constructing a new, purpose-built building on site to house one, and the cost depends on its size. When you add up the expense of the pool itself, the labour of the team of professionals who’ll install it and the building materials, the total can be anything from £95,000 to £350,000.

There Are Home Adaptations For Every Budget

By using some of these things and implementing some of these changes, you can make your home more suitable for those living with mobility challenges or visual impairments. And don’t forget to see if you qualify for help with funding – check out our guide here.

Wondering how it works if you rent your home, rather than own it? We’ve got that covered, too. Click here for all of the ins and outs of enhancing a rented space.