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Practical Strategies for an Accessible Bathroom · Mid Mod Remodel

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you're updating a mid-century bathroom, you really want to give at least a little thought to making it more accessible.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Think of this as protecting your investment in nice tile and other surfaces, doing your future self a favor, and generally extending the lifespan of your remodel.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in some cases, I help clients to plan out an entirely new bathroom in a house that's entirely accessibility oriented for a user who already knows what their remodel level needs are.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I also often work with clients who just want to plan to stay in their existing home as long as possible and want to know what they can do to make an existing bathroom footprint the best use of its space.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: So today let's talk about both of those cases and all the considerations you might want to include when you update a mid-century bathroom for accessibility.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Hey there, welcome back to Midmod Remodel.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to episode 2504.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get right into it.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Last fall, I did a long episode on general accessibility choices and home remodels.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: That would be episode 2206, if you're curious.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you can go deep into a lot of these topics, but today I'm going to keep it pretty snappy and focus on the things you want to consider when making accessibility-friendly changes to a mid-century bathroom.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: That said, I will still be dropping in references to some visual metrics, some photo or some sketch examples of past projects of mine, things like the turning radius you might want to choose based on Americans with Disabilities Act ADA guidelines.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Those don't, by the way, apply to homes.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: They are laws governing commercial and public spaces, but they're still good guidelines for how to think about moving a person in a wheelchair, for example, around a space.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll put all of those links and references and images in the show notes page.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Find that per usual at midmod-midwest.com slash 2504, this episode's number.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: So let's just talk about briefly why it's important to think about accessibility in your remodeling plans in general, but let's talk about specifically the bathroom.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine I would love to know that this is true about you.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: You are a hail and hearty person with no difficulty getting around a bathroom.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you care about accessibility?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there are a couple of reasons.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone can slip on a banana peel and find themselves in a cast for a few weeks or months.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So can anyone else in your life?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Or you might meet someone uh at any point who has current or ongoing accessibility needs.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: We are all also getting older every minute, and so we may need in the future things that we don't need now.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point, do you want to have to tear out the otherwise lovely choices you once made for your bathroom?
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you want to find that you already prepared yourself for this?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then even if you yourself never need to take advantage of any accessibility-oriented design choices in your bathroom, someone you will never know, a future owner, could also benefit from these choices.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I've already talked this season about planning for the lifetime of our houses.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: So why wouldn't we want to make choices that have universal functionality for our homes whenever we possibly can?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: That said, there are some very specific use cases, bathrooms that are designed to support a full-time wheelchair user andor a person with mobility limitations that require the sport of another person for bathing.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Those are not going to be wrangled into a mid-century bathroom footprint with a few simple substitutions.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Mid-century bathrooms just aren't that large for a start.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we will be talking today about a couple of different types of remodels and making a distinction between the kind of project where you are starting from scratch, rearranging the locations of all the plumbing footprints within an existing bathroom space, moving some of the walls to make an existing bathroom bigger, combining two back-to-back bathrooms into one, for example, or borrowing space from one bathroom to another, or moving the bathroom to an entirely new location in the house, taking over a bedroom, putting on an addition, that sort of thing.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: That is one kind of planning for accessibility remodel.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are also a number of accessibility-friendly choices you can make in one-to-one upgrades of an existing mid-century bathroom layout.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: There are important wins in either case, but as I always say, when we're thinking about master plan method, it's important to set your scope, to think about your goals first.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: So asking yourself what you think you can predict about your life, whether you already know you have loved ones who have or might have in the future higher assistance space planning needs, if you can identify what any of those might be, you can lean in that direction in a remodel, or if you just want some good general practices for people who are quietly getting older, we'll build those into our discussions today as well.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're making existing bathroom substitution choices, new finishes, substitute appliances, the flip coin choice of a tub or shower, even the choice of glass door or shower curtain, we can do a lot just picking one over another to keep a bathroom future forward.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're planning for specific accessibility needs that require things like lift devices or wheelchair turning radii, it's probably gonna be considered a start from scratch bathroom project.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a bunch of different categories of accessibility-friendly choices I'm gonna talk about today.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And each of these have some amount you could do right away versus some amount that require planning ahead or building into them.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna start with lighting and visual contrast for those of us who can see.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: We can't all see equally, and as we age, we lose visual acuity.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: We also lose the ability to tell one shape from another in dim lighting.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: So being able to light a bathroom up brightly is very important, even though, for a daily use perspective, it will be very unpleasant to have a bathroom that is always lit up like the surface of the sun.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: You want to have the ability to flip switches and run the dimmers all the way up and light a bathroom entirely very brightly.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: The flip side of that for humid comfort is that you also want to be able to turn those dimmers down.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you can have dim or pleasant light depending on who's using the bathroom under what conditions and when.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is also just practical for anybody.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to be able to like check for a spot or apply makeup or apply wound care properly, you're gonna want a very brightly lit bathroom in the first thing in the morning, late in the evening.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: You're probably gonna want a more pleasantly dim light.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So this is just gonna benefit you every day of your life, no matter what.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: You might also want to go further and think about lighting for accessibility, meaning lighting underneath the kick plate of cabinets or underneath pendant cabinets, running a light along the edge of the floor, baseboard light, or having a light on a motion sensor that will come on whenever anyone enters the bathroom, even if their hands are occupied or otherwise unavailable.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is as easy as a simple plug-in motion sensor light.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, for people who aren't planning a remodel right now, I really like the disc-shaped uh motion sensor lights sold by Casper Mattress Company.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm sure they don't make them, they've contracted them somewhere, but they look nice, uh, create a very pleasant effect, and are always on just a little bit when it's dark in the room and then brighten up lightly, uh subtly, I guess is what I mean to say, when you come into the room.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: But it would be nicer to have this as a hardwired effect rather than having it taking up one of the plugs.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're planning remodel, you'll create a similar effect in a planned way.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, when we're talking about visual contrast, it's not just how much light there is in a room, it's how much the different surfaces are easy to be read from each other.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: So a fully monochromatic bathroom, for example, an entirely white bathroom, might read as very interesting and dramatic or very pure and simple, but it's not the most accessibility-friendly space.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's easier if we have a distinction between, for example, the color, the value of different surfaces, a flooring surface being distinct from a wall surface, so you can sort of see at a glance, even with squinty vision or limited visual acuity, where the edges, the perimeter of the floor are, having a different, again, material value color on the surfaces of the vanity cabinet versus the counter on the counter versus the floor, so you can see where a drop-off might be.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: All of these things will be helpful visual cues for someone whose visual acuity is limited.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, the next thing to consider as a collection of small choices is going to be supporting stability.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, how can we have non-slippy surfaces, minimize steps, hopefully remove steps entirely?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: How can we create places to rest throughout the bathroom, somewhere you can sit down, that's not necessarily the toilet seat, and put in places to grab onto in relevant spots.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: So this might be installing grab bars in key places inside the shower, adjacent to the toilet, near the sink.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you're not in the vein of needing to have grab bars installed yet, you can at least put in the blocking, that is, bits of wood or structure, in the wall underneath the finished surfaces to support future grab bar placement.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you can go ahead and put your tile in, you can get everything set up the way you like it, and then at a time in the future where someone might need grab bars, you can go back to your reference photos of the construction process and note where extra studs may have been placed in the wall as blocking to easily mount grab bars securely to.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Planning ahead doesn't mean doing all of it, but it does mean setting up a situation which won't prevent you from going forward to it later.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't mean you have to destroy your existing pretty tile in order to fit in an accessibility accommodation later down the line.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can also think about, as I mentioned, places to sit down.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: This might be anywhere in the bathroom having a makeup counter with a chair built into it, or a chair matched to it, or putting in a bench inside the shower.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is a place where for reasonably mobile people or for medium mobile people, having a built-in bench is a great idea.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: For people who are going to need more intense accessibility accommodations, actually, it's better to have a medical grade flip-down bench.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you would want to have just plenty of clear floor area in the shower area.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: But having a place to sit, having grab bars to grab onto, having non-slippy services, and having as little step roll-in shower is what this is often described as being, are all choices that you make to support stability in bathroom using.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: We also, in a similar vein, want to make room for any mobility or stability aids that might come in with a person into the bathroom.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: So this means having a 36-inch wide path from the door to the toilet.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: It might also mean having a five-foot diameter turning radius for a person in a wheelchair to make a full rotation.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: But it also can just mean having room beside the toilet for a person to set a walker to one side and sit down.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: It falls into the same category as the roll-in shower and having room at the vanity, perhaps space underneath the sink, maybe a floating sink.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons I like to do wall-mounted vanities in bathrooms is aesthetic because it makes the small bathrooms feel slightly larger.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's also a maintenance thing.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: I love not having the wooden surface of a vanity come down and touch the tile surface of a floor, which sometimes has water on it, so no water ever gets wicked up into the wood or particle board that makes up the vanity material.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: But another reason to walm out the vanity is in the future, if you ever needed to change it up, if you needed to make a cut so that there was room to pull in a roll-up surface, the flooring underneath it would already be continuous go all the way to the wall, so you wouldn't be needing to do major repairs that would look visually unappealing when you're making an after-use accommodation at the vanity for a roll-up access to the sink.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at a diagram, and I'll put a couple of diagrams on the show notes page for this, uh, the the classic accessibility-friendly bathroom has a bunch of open space in the middle.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's the five-foot diameter turning radius for a wheelchair.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: You'll often see a circle drawn on the floor in those bathrooms if they're proving to a code official, for example, that they have.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's five foot.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've written in my notes this five-foot diameter turning radius, which is so confusing.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a five-foot radius.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's not ten feet across, it's five foot across circle, five foot diameter, just to emphasize that point.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's not an unreasonable dimension in a bathroom, but it is pretty big if you think about bathrooms in the scale of mid-century houses, which often have, if they're lucky, just that 36-inch wide path to the toilet.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, what's much more common, uh, my next category is access to the room in general, which falls under the heading of Room for Mobility AIDS.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this may mean widening the doorway.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: The 36-inch wide to the path to the toilet begins at the door.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of mid-century bathrooms have doors as narrow as two feet wide.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's a standard closet door these days.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: That is not enough to roll in a chair.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and when you're thinking about your 36-inch wide path, it should be uninterrupted the entire way.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: So even if your doorway opening is actually 36 inches, the space that the open door takes may eat a little bit of that 36 inches, making it not quite 36 inches wide.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, not every chair requires a 36-inch width.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you already know the dimensions of your accessibility aids, you might be able to compromise to squish that a little, but this is just something to think about in terms of ideal use cases and what you can and cannot get into changing right away at the point of going into a bathroom.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: One thing that is true of mid-century bathrooms, this is true in the bathroom of my own home, and I often see it, is that bathroom spaces feel really small.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like the vanity takes up an unreasonable portion of the space because the bathroom is relatively narrow.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because probably as originally installed, that bathroom didn't have a vanity.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: It had a wall-mounted or a pedestal sink only.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And as vanity cabinets have become absolutely standard, we've just gone ahead and put them in, and it makes the whole room feel too small by default.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: But the intention was to put the storage somewhere else, often in a vertical cabinet tucked in behind a shower or around the corner or even in the little cabinet outside the bathroom, although that's not my favorite, or in a medicine cabinet embedded in the wall, and not to have any under-sink storage whatsoever.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: When you're planning for chair access in a bathroom, that might be a choice to consider returning to because it's going to give you more knee room at a critical point in the height.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: What are other mobility aid room considerations?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, you also just want to think about for someone who is approaching a bathroom from a seated position, what can they reach?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: We want to make sure that mirrors mounted on the wall have either a built-in tilt to them or can be tilted so that someone at sitting height can see their face reflected in the glass.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And also think about the height of any shelving or medicine cabinet or vanity storage being within arm's reach from a seated position.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is the sort of thing that, again, I'll link to some sort of rule of thumb images on the show notes page, but I'm not going to read you off, rattle off a bunch of measurements right now.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: You can also just think about it from a common sense perspective if that is your expected situation.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: The next thing you can do, and this really does fall under the category of just one choice over another, is make sure that all of the finishes and fixtures you choose move towards accessibility friendliness.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the door handles, but also the cabinet and drawer handles.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: It is the faucets and the plumbing fixtures, should all be chosen with an eye towards.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Can someone with limited grip strength get to that?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Can you bump it with your hand and turn it?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: So a knob is never going to be the right choice for that.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Levers are a better bet.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: You want to think about things that have an obvious sort of get your finger hooked around it approach.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh again, I accommodate I covered this in detail in the episode last fall about general accommodations.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but if you're thinking about hardware for your door handles, your drawer handles, and your vanity, you want to think about being able to get four fingers tucked into the opening of any drawer loop.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: You want to think about not having little overhanging ends, as is a very common classic builder budget, builder basic budget style is the sort of like T-bar style with little sticking off pieces.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Those are real big snag risks.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And even for those of us with minimal accessibility needs, we've probably sacrificed a pocket or back in the days of corded headphones, a headphone cord to that kind of catch surface.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: So avoid those.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, just generally think about is there any notation on this product for sale about it being accessibility friendly?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Does it seem like the kind of thing you can easily get a hand around?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have to have grip strength to operate it, or can you just hook a finger or hook the edge of your hands into it?
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Can you get three fingers into it to pull on it?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if not, consider something else.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: It will not be more expensive to make a more um grab-friendly handle choice than not.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can get the same finish from the same company in two different styles, and you can make a more future forward choice just by thinking about how this would meet accessibility needs or not as you go forward to it.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you're looking for more information on this, I'm gonna point you to my YouTube channel to a video I made earlier this year.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the title is Pick Hardware slash handles for your mid-century vintage or modern rate model.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I definitely go into some of the ADA ratings and recommendations for hardware, for things you can grab, things you can pull, and ideal shapes to choose versus the very shape you should never choose.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'll link to that as well on the show notes for this page.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: One substitution choice that's come up recently with me in several client consult calls I've had where people have called in for a 30-minute check-in on their ongoing remodeling project and how their choices are going to feel mid-century or how they're going to talk to their contractor about it, what's the right choice for their house, have been tubs versus showers and glass shower enclosures versus shower curtains.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I've talked about whether you do or do not need a tub in your house lots on this podcast.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the short, short version of that is you only need a tub in your house if you want one.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you, as an adult in your life, prefer to relax by bathing, then yes, you need a tub somewhere in your house, preferably in your owner's daily use bathroom.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you have small children who are regularly getting bathed, you may prioritize wanting to keep a shallow mid-century, 15-inch high style tub.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you're an adult who likes to bathe, I recommend a deeper soaking tub style.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're neither of those and you really don't see using a tub as a major part of your daily experience, then I highly recommend you prioritize a shower enclosure in the place where a mid-century house would have put a tub.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is going to be a more accessibility-friendly choice.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it's possible, if again, if you're designing a bathroom from scratch, to think about the kind of tub that you can actually open a door on, get into it's watertight, and then you can sit in the tub and flood yourself with water.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great choice if you've got the room for it and the budget for it.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're just trying to future-proof a mid-century bathroom footprint right now, substituting a zero curb roll-in shower space for the existing, probably vintage cast iron tub is going to be a better choice for long-term use.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: And when we go ahead with that, the luxury bathroom version of that often has a full glass enclosure around the shower, but that is not going to be your ideal choice for an accessibility-friendly bathroom.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because imagine just trying to get in and out of that using a chair or any kind of assistive device manipulating a glass door when you're feeling wobbly.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: None of that is a good thing.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, from a purely accessibility perspective, you want to have a shower curtain that comes across and closes, and that will keep water from getting everywhere when you're in there, but will allow someone to come in and provide assistance if needed, will allow you to come in with your assistive device and just generally make that whole process a lot simpler and smoother.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's a bunch of other reasons to choose a curtain over glass doors.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: I recommend curtains for any house where it's a family bathroom, where somebody might be in the shower and someone else has to come in and grab something forgot or get a pump of lotion or a hair clip or something.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: If someone's gonna ever open the door and come into the bathroom when the shower is in use, it's nicer to have an opaque shower curtain than it is to have a glass door.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's just allows family sharing to work better.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: I also recommend a shower curtain to anyone who thinks they might have fussy feelings about water spots on glass.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're the kind of person who takes joy in squeegeeing the glass perfectly clean every day, knock yourself out.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are the kind of person who doesn't want to squeegee the glass clean every day, but will be annoyed by water spots on glass, don't put glass in a prominent place in your bathroom, is my recommendation.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: Reasons on the pro side for putting in a glass shower enclosure are that it can create a smaller volume of air for.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can get nice and humid and warm and pleasant.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that can be a really nice showering experience.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: You can actually go ahead and install a full steam shower system in there or multiple waterheads.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's better for water control to make sure no water is ever getting out of the shower area.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: All of those things are true.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's also absolutely possible, as I was saying, you don't have to install grab bars now to have grab bars later.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can go ahead and install a glass shower door now with a plan that it could be removed and the tile could be patched, and then you could go back to a shower uh curtain at a time when you needed more easy access to the shower enclosure with an assistive device.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I've been going back and forth this whole episode on the fact that you could just make choices to repair in place a mid-century bathroom and make it more accessibility friendly.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you're going beyond that, if you're leaning to or currently need a full roll-in bathroom with a turning radius in the middle of it, you're likely going to find yourself reclaiming a bedroom for an entirely new bathroom space rather than being able to fit in every accessibility need you might have into a standard builder grade ranch bath footprint.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is something I often recommend for past clients who have needed this sort of thing.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: I will link to a couple of case study examples in the show notes.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And particularly for someone who is now living alone or a couple who are not who don't have children or other family members living in the house but might have the occasional guest to downgrade from three bathroom, three bedrooms to two or four bedrooms to three, or to think about making a new bedroom space in a basement and reclaiming one of the main floor bedrooms as a bathroom can be a really practical choice to extend the lifespan of the house for you.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: One thing I always recommend when doing this, and if you want to go deeper into this, you probably want to check out either the Mid-Century Design Clinic, a two-hour live workshop I recorded a couple of years ago, I gave on additions, or the one on owner's suites.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: In both of those, I talk about some of the pros and cons of various ways of adding on.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I highly recommend that if you're going to do something as complicated and multi-contractor-based, electrician, plumber, etc., as a bathroom, I always want you to think about how you could put that footprint in the existing house.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're going to then add on a bedroom, you're taking over a bedroom and you're adding on a bedroom, rather than keeping the existing bedroom and then putting on a bathroom addition, I would put a bathroom in the existing bedroom footprint and then put on a bedroom edition, a much simpler, more box-like space over new area, and then keep the new put the new bathroom into an existing bedroom space over existing basement crawl space or slab foundation within the existing house footprint.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: All in all, a hospital-level chair-friendly bathroom is a tall order for someone who's hoping to future-proof their bathroom update, but you certainly can make a lot of choices towards this that will help you feel more at home in your home for longer and make all of the pretty investments you're making a nice tile and the fixture you want to displurge on, and uh really gorgeous, um, slightly custom vanity or a vanity with a really nice finish last longer by not having to tear them all out in five years, ten years, fifteen years, or twenty years to put in accessibility-friendly choices at a later date.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll put notes for all of this and a bunch of visual examples for you to go check out on the show notes page, midmod-midwest.com slash 2504, and be back next year with more next year, be back next week with more fun advice on mid-century bathroom updates.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: But for the moment, I'm actually curious.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to hear from you if accessibility-friendly choices are a high priority for you, something you never thought about before and are now curious about, or something you think doesn't apply to you at all and could never be useful.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm gonna go out on the limb and assume that that ladder isn't isn't what I'm gonna hear from anyone, but you never know.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: So shoot me an email, say hi on Instagram, um, comment on this episode in whatever medium you listen to podcasts, and we will continue to talk about great choices for mid century homes in the next episode.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: See you there.