Accessible Home: Modify Your Laundry Room for Wheelchair Accessibility
By Rossetti, Rosemarie; Action Magazine,Publication Date: December 19, 2007
Article offers advice on modifying a laundry room to make it wheelchair-accessible. The author describes modifications she made to her own laundry room after she became a wheelchair user following a spinal-cord injury. Accommodations described include: (1) a long-handed reacher to retrieve clothes from her top-loading washer and put them in the dryer, and for getting clothes out of the back of the dryer; (2) brackets attached at convenient height to the walls of the laundry room for hanging clothing removed from the dryer; (3) laundry products transferred from larger containers to smaller ones that can be stored on shelves within reach; (4) the use of laundry baskets small enough to fit on the lap for wheeling clean clothes from the laundry room to the bedroom; and (5) a basket for dirty laundry, fit with gliders on the bottom, which the author positions between her feet and “bulldozes” into the laundry room. For transferring clothing, the author advices placing the washer and dryer so that the appliance on the left side has the door hinge on the left side, and the one on the right has the hinge on the right side. For her new model accessible home, the Universal Living Laboratory (http://www.udll.com), the author has selected a front-loading washer and dryer with a 10-inch pedestal underneath for appliance accessibility from a seated position. She advises those in the market for a front-loading washing machine to evaluate the ease of reaching control knobs, soap dispenser, and lint filter.
Published by: United Spinal Association (Website:http://www.unitedspinal.org)
Link to text: http://www.unitedspinal.org/publications/action/2007/12/19/accessible-home-modify-your-laundry-room-for-wheelchair-accessibility/
