This is going to be a weekend of planning for us! The start of the process of adapting our house – exciting but daunting too!
Our house is a Victorian cottage of a fairly standard layout. It needed a lot of TLC when we first bought it (it had no central heating system, a fetching pink and avocado bathroom suite and no fitted kitchen!). As a couple of architectural designers this suited us perfectly, as we love a project! However at the time Twinkle was just a few months old and we had no idea about her neurological condition or how that would affect our future. If we did, we would have made some different choices in the design.
It has been an emotional journey to get to this point too. Twinkle’s condition only very gradually revealed itself to us and it has taken time for us get into the mindset that we do actually have a disabled daughter and that does and will continue to have an impact on how she, and the rest of the family, can use our home.
We therefore find ourselves looking at grant funding for making some adaptations to allow our little Twinkle to join in fully with family life: https://www.gov.uk/disabled-facilities-grants/overview
Our lovely Occupational Therapist made her first assessment visit to the house a few weeks ago and we have a follow up visit, with both her and a building surveyor, on Monday. We are taking this weekend to arm ourselves with a strategy on how we’d like to progress the project. We want to ensure that anything we do to improve accessibility now will be as flexible as possible for Twinkle’s ever changing needs (we are not ruling out the possibility that she may be able to get up the stairs under her own steam one day!) and we don’t want to scupper any further alteration options for our home in the future……….not to mention trying to keep things stylish (well as stylish as you can be with two small children and two dogs!)!