A Home of Our Own

Author: Laurence Clark

When my wife and I first moved into our new bungalow, I think some of our neighbours assumed it had been turned into a care home... like that's the collective noun for more than one disabled person living together!

It is still commonly assumed that disabled people only want specialist social housing, yet more and more of us are seeking the right to become homeowners. Both my wife Adele and I have mobility impairments, so it took us eighteen months to find a home to buy that had the potential to be adapted to our requirements.

I used to avidly search the property websites every week for newly-added bungalows in my neighbourhood, trying to guess from the estate agent's descriptions whether we'd stand a chance of adapting them to be accessible. When considering a bungalow I'm interested in factors that are rarely described in their literature, such as whether there are steps to get in, internal layout, width of doorways, bathroom size etc.

I took great delight in visiting show homes, just to see the sales agents' reaction to me. Typically this would be a look of horror when they saw me coming towards them in my wheelchair, their minds racing to work out the quickest way to get rid of me without causing a scene. I get the most fun out of visiting inaccessible show flats, since then they had the added embarrassment of dealing with me on the doorstep, in full view of passers by. Visits arranged by estate agents to people's homes were also problematic, since I could always visibly see the owner's heart sink when they caught sight of me and immediately wrote off any possibility of making a sale!

When we finally found somewhere and visited the bank, our mortgage adviser gave us a booklet on life insurance. The front cover showed someone on crutches and asked what would happen to our mortgage repayments if this was to happen to us. We explained that this already has happened to us, since my wife actually does use crutches and I use a wheelchair all the time� he was lost for words!

Even though the bungalow we bought was fairly accessible, we still had to do quite a lot of work on it. We knocked together a storage cupboard and w/c to create an en-suite wet room, since the existing shower cubicle was completely inaccessible to us. We had to replace two PVC front doors which had a 2-inch threshold with accessible doors that had a low threshold and electric lock. Eventually we replaced the driveway in order to have level access into the property.

We ended up paying for most of this work ourselves, since we decided at the time there was no point in applying for a Disabled Facilities Grant from our local authority. This was because we would not have been considered a priority and could have ended up waiting anything up to 8 years to have our application considered. Even then we would still have ended up paying for most of the adaptations ourselves since the grant is means tested and we both work. Furthermore, if we'd gone down this route then we'd have had to pay back whatever money we got from the grant if we moved home again within 5 years, thus we would be restricted if, say, one of us were to be offered a job in a different part of the country.

Factors such as the ageing population and current social policy encouraging more and more disabled people to be in work and live in the community mean that the demand for accessible housing will most certainly increase over time. So why is it that we do not seem to be moving toward a point where it becomes the norm to build accessible, or at least adaptable, homes that everybody can live in?