« Previous Next »

Bathrooms

Posted by kmancer on March 11th, 2010

The rule is, no bathtubs in units with only one bathroom. If there are two bathrooms, a bathtub in one of them is fine. Bathtubs are hard to get into and hard to get out of. If someone needs help with bathing, it is much easier to provide that assistance in a shower. It really should not be necessary to point this out in 2010, but sadly it is. Of course the no bathtub prohibition applies only to new buildings—there are thousands of units with bathtubs in old buildings. Some places are replacing bathtubs with showers and that is a good idea, although relatively costly.

Floors in bathrooms should be non-slip. Toilets should be raised. There should be enough grab bars in the right places[i] but please try and make the bathroom look safe and inviting, not like something straight out of a hospital ward. Towel bars can double as grab bars if they are sturdy enough. As long as walls are reinforced for later installation of additional grab bars, it is not necessary to have every square inch of a shower enclosure covered with grab bars. It’s interesting to note that my 20-something son lived for a while in an apartment that had originally been intended to accommodate seniors. The requisite grab bars had been placed in the shower enclosure and beside the toilet. When he moved away from the apartment, he missed the grab bars! Anyone can slip in a shower—you don’t have to be 85 for that fate to befall you.

[i] See CMHC, Evaluation of Optimal Grab Bar Placement for Seniors

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Senior Housing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.