What forces people out of their homes is rarely one big thing. It is a slow pile-up of small problems that could have been fixed. This handbook collects several hundred of those fixes, room by room — and most of them cost nothing.
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192 pages, 27 chapters, and checklists you can fill in.
The book opens with a short list that most people recognize from their own house.
Most of the fixes cost nothing. Almost none of them need a contractor.
Most people put the grab bar inside the shower. The one that prevents the most falls goes at the entry point, upright, right where your hand reaches as you step in and out. And a suction-cup bar is not a grab bar. It is a towel holder that looks like one, and it lets go without warning.
A sixty-year-old eye needs two to three times as much light as a twenty-year-old eye to see the same detail. Your home was lit for a younger you. The fix is cheap, and it starts with reading the box for lumens, not watts.
Sit on the edge of your bed. Your feet should rest flat on the floor with your knees at about a right angle. If your feet dangle, the bed is too high. If your knees sit above your hips, it is too low — and a set of bed risers costs around twenty dollars.
Hold your arms out in your kitchen. The space between your hips and your shoulders is where everything you use every day should live. In most kitchens it is the other way round: the daily pot is on the top shelf and the twice-a-year platter sits at eye level. One afternoon puts it right.
A key lockbox lets paramedics get in without breaking the door. Give the code to two people you trust, and tell your police non-emergency line and your medical alert company that it is there. Ambulance crews break a great many doors that did not need breaking.
Scammers can now copy a voice from a few seconds of social media video. The book's advice: hang up, call your grandchild directly, and agree on a family code word today. And for the record, Social Security numbers are never suspended.
Every suggestion in the book carries one of four cost markers, so you know what you are getting into before you start.
Roughly three-quarters of the suggestions are free or under twenty dollars. For the rest, Chapter 25 maps out the programs that may pay — from your local Area Agency on Aging to help with heating bills that many people who qualify never apply for.
And where a job involves electricity, gas, the structure of the house or a ladder, the book tells you plainly to hire someone. Chapter 27 tells you roughly what it should cost.
It isn't built for that. It is built to be used, one room at a time, at your own pace.
A home improved one room at a time over three months is a transformed home. If you would rather follow a set schedule, Appendix E lays out sixty days, one small job at a time.
Twenty-seven chapters in five parts, plus eight pages to fill in and keep.
The complete home handbook for staying safe, comfortable and independent
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The checklists, emergency sheet and home log are meant to be printed and filled in by hand.
The text is set larger than in most books, and on a tablet you can enlarge it as far as you like.