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Redesigning Your Home: Room-By-Room

This section describes simple, often low-cost steps that will help you to continue living in your home—safely, comfortably, and in charge.

Accessibility and Safety Considerations

Here we provide information and resources to help you make home modifications—such as lighting and glare, color and contrast—that you can use to make room-by-room changes throughout your home and maintain control of your personal living environment.

Evaluating and modifying your home does not have to be expensive or difficult. Many useful adaptations are as simple as installing a brighter light bulb, replacing sheer curtains with mini-blinds to cut down on glare, or marking the edges of steps with brightly colored tape or paint to make them easier to see. These simple modifications can also help you to prevent falls in your home and promote safety.

Factors to Consider

When considering changes always keep three factors in mind: predictability, visibility, and touchability.

Predictability simply means organizing furniture, objects, closets, and cabinets in ways you find comfortable and can easily remember. Always remind family members and visitors to let you know if something’s been moved.

Visibility covers a broader range of adaptations, from simply making items bigger (large-print labels, clocks, etc.) to making things adjustable—such as increasing lighting, reducing glare, and employing strong color and contrast, different textures, or tactile markings throughout the home. Finding out what works best for you will take a little time and experimentation, so let’s explore the methods in more detail.

Touchability is another critical factor. Effective use of your tactile sense can increase efficiency and help reduce eye fatigue. You can use your sense of touch to supplement the use of contrast, such as a bright orange touch dot on the power button of your TV remote; or texture changes to help you navigate, such as wood flooring to carpet or tiles; and organize your home, such as containers that feel different to hold items within a cabinet. Different textures or tactile markings throughout an environment can help you locate specific rooms more easily, identify objects or organize your home more effectively. Finding out what works best for you will take a little time and experimentation. Suggestions for each room in your home are covered in this section. You may want to do a home evaluation to determine what you need to do.

 

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