Projects, such as renovations, need careful planning especially when they are being placed into a historic establishment. This is the main concern with the handicap accessibility project at hand. Since the project requires handicap accessibility to the first floor of the house, the focus of the group was to change as little as possible to the residence in order to keep the esthetics as they were.
The first problem of this project was finding a way into the home. Every entrance in the house had a staircase involved. This created a problem because the first thought in the design was to place ramps over the staircases for accessibility. This was not very practical because the stairs located inside of the house did not have much room for a lamp of adequate length. Placing a ramp on an outside staircase would not work either because this grotesque ramp would be wrapping half-way around the house creating an eyesore. Some other devise had to be used in order for people to get up and down one of the staircases in the house.
Steering away from the ramp, it was decided that a motorized lift should be used instead. Several lifts were found that could carry a person in a wheelchair up or down a flight of
The lifts are designed especially for one-person use. This is a nice feature because some people do not like to be taken care of by others. With small folding ramps on three sides of the platform, the user could wheel themselves onto the lift. Safety arms on the lift would fold down to hold the person on the platform along with the small ramps that would fold up to be perpendicular to the floor, also holding the passenger in. Easy to read and use operating buttons are located on the lift so that the user could control it by themselves. After the lift has reached its destination at the top of the landing, the operator would get off and send the lift back down using the control box located on the wall.
The next step was to find out which staircase would be the best for this lift. Every staircase in the house was considered, but some were to difficult to get into, and some were just too nice to put a lift onto. After much debate, the service door on the west side of the house had the best staircase location. The entrance was directly off of the driveway, so there will be no need to let people in from the back of the house when everyone else is using the front door. However, this is the main entrance for the residence. The staircase is about f
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