115: Step-Free Entrance Routes

Show Notes:

Blog Post: Why step-free entries are harder to build than it seems.

Good Fit / Poor Fit: Home Survey

Style Guide: Pathway Examples

Residential Universal Design Specifications: Chapter 2: Entrance Routes

• 2.2.1 No steps.

Considering a ramp? Here are some details and specifications.

Transcript:

Sarah: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Good Fit Poor Fit. Our podcast is part of The UD Project, a small business rooted in occupational therapy that looks at how the design of a home environment impacts how well people of different ages and abilities perform everyday activities. We chat about this unique perspective to boost your knowledge and help you consider what can be changed in communities like yours.

Learn more about our work at universaldesign.org.
This episode is part of an ongoing series here on Good Fit Poor Fit. We’re going deep on residential universal design specifications, walking through every major area of the home with an occupational therapy lens. Along the way, you’ll hear stories about real people. Whose lives are shaped by the design choices we discuss.

Whether you are a rehab therapist, a designer, a builder, or someone thinking [00:01:00] ahead about your own home, this series is built for you. Start with episode 107 for the full picture. A good fit doesn’t happen by accident. Let’s get into it.

Sarah: Hey there, Good Fit Poor Fit listeners, and welcome back to another episode. Rebecca and I are moving you through the outside pathways of homes to discuss the important features that need to be on your radar.

Rebecca: Indeed, we’ve covered so much already in this new series, from pathway surfaces to slopes and lighting, and yet we still haven’t gotten to one of the most talked about features when it comes to accessibility, steps.

Sarah: Yes, steps are definitely a big one. So picture this. You’ve just been discharged from the hospital. Maybe it’s a scheduled hip replacement. Maybe it’s a heart procedure leaving you fatigued. Maybe it’s nothing dramatic at all, just a bad sprain and you have to be on crutches for six weeks.

Somebody [00:02:00] drives you home, they pull into the driveway and you sit there for a second looking at your own front door like it’s a problem to be solved. Two steps. You’ve walked these two steps probably 10,000 times in your life without thinking about them once, but today they are definitely on your mind.

Rebecca: This is such a classic scenario. This can come up for anyone at any time. You’re bringing in new furniture that’s too bulky to hoist up steps, or you’re pushing a cart full of groceries or a stroller. Most of us have had this experience where we realize, I never think about my front steps because they’ve never caused a barrier for me before, but now they’re the bane of my existence.” So this isn’t a situation reserved for people coming home from the hospital or people with limited mobility, people who use mobility devices. This is a universal experience, and that’s why steps are the single biggest barrier in residential home design.

Sarah: I really love that point. It is a universal experience, and that’s why we’re starting here [00:03:00] today. Because it is a barrier in getting inside your own home or visiting other people’s homes.

Rebecca: That’s right. So of every barrier we’ve talked about in this series so far, this one is kind of different. So a narrow pathway can slow someone down, or a bad surface can make someone be more careful. A step in a pathway onto a porch or through an entrance can keep someone from entering that home altogether. There’s no real workaround the way that you can work around a lot of other design features.

Sarah: That’s really the major point we’re trying to emphasize. Not every wheelchair user can pop their wheelchair up a step. Additionally, not every caregiver is equipped with the skills or the strength to help with that task. Maybe it’s not even possible to lift the chair, especially if it’s a heavy power chair.

A walker can be lifted technically, but try doing that alone, holding your balance on one leg while you hoist a walker over a six-inch rise. A [00:04:00] person pushing a stroller with a sleeping toddler will have to do the same thing. Steps don’t just affect the people we usually picture. They affect a person pulling a hand truck, a rolling suitcase, someone carrying two bags of groceries who can’t see their feet, or people delivering furniture and appliances, like Rebecca said.

Rebecca: And here’s another issue that comes up quite often. A home is built with an accessible entrance, So it’s easy to think that that checks the box and gives people a no-step option to enter. And that’s true, but what happens when they want to go into another part of the house? Or if that one accessible entrance is out of commission for some reason? In an ideal world, one accessible entrance really wouldn’t be enough for a fully functional household. We need to consider the front door, the side doors, the garage, or a back patio door too.

Sarah: Yeah, we actually have that in our current home. We can get through the front door, no [00:05:00] problem, and the garage, no problem, and we can even get out onto the screened-in porch, but not into the backyard. There are two steps down, so my husband, who uses a wheelchair, has to go all the way around the house and through the fence to hang out in the yard versus to be stuck on the screened-in porch.

Rebecca: And that does matter, especially when we’re thinking about universal design as a tool for creating more inclusive communities where everyone has equitable opportunities to participate. Now getting off my soapbox about that, before someone leaves the hospital or a rehab stay, the entrance is usually the first thing that OTs think about before the rest of the house. ‘Cause if someone can’t get in the door, then none of the other recommendations for inside the house really matter quite yet.

Sarah: Exactly. I had this conversation with a couple that I worked with. I did a home evaluation, and this couple, they were planning ahead. The wife was concerned about her husband, and in the future, if he was ever [00:06:00] unable to use his legs and go up the steps, she wanted to see what could be done in their current space to the outside of the home to prepare for that.

Unfortunately, there were many more changes inside the house that needed to happen to the bathroom, just to even use a walker or a wheelchair, and then it didn’t make sense to address the eight stairs outside because the inside was ultimately unusable.
Rebecca: And even sometimes in the middle of historical homes, there’s legislation that says you can’t change the front of the facade in order to maintain the historical look or, you know, other issues like this.

Sarah: Yes, I had another home eval like this one as well, and we actually had to go around back and figure out a more expensive option of a stair lift instead of just adjusting the front. But when you start fresh and doing a new build, you have options. So this is the spec that gets push back most at the design [00:07:00] table, because it visually changes the front of the house.

Many people want to have this grand entrance with steps and do all the decorating, and sometimes it’s the lay of the land that causes many to put steps in the path to the entrance and up to the entrance. Plus, a traditional ramp visibly changes how the front of the house looks. People have an image in their head of what an accessible entrance looks like, and it’s usually not flattering.
Part of what we want to do today is take that image apart and give some other options.

Rebecca: Right. So I wanna bring in a more human perspective on this and introduce you to someone whose front door is exactly the problem that we’ve been describing. So this is Dominic. He’s 45. He had a stroke about four years ago, and he uses a power wheelchair full-time now. He works part-time as a consultant, mostly from home. And if you talk to him, you will come to realize that he is extremely independent. He doesn’t like asking for [00:08:00] help. He’s built a life in which he mostly doesn’t have to ask for help. He bought his current home about two years after his stroke, and it was, in his words, the most accessible option in his price range, which he’ll also tell you is a pretty low bar. The front entry has two steps, nothing dramatic, nothing super steep, and he’s worked hard in PT to manage those steps. And most of his family would walk up without a second thought. Yet he bought the house knowing he wouldn’t really use that entrance.

Sarah: And what strikes me about Dominic’s situation is that nothing about it reads as an emergency. He’s not stuck. He’s not unsafe. He has a workaround, and the workaround generally works. He enters through the garage instead, which adds about 40 feet to every trip in or out of his home. That’s every grocery run, every time he steps out to get the mail, every visitor with similar abilities who has to be redirected around to a door that isn’t the front door.[00:09:00]

Rebecca: And Dominic has shifted his daily routines to make this work, but he still thinks about how he could change up his front entrance to make it more usable for him, for his friends, for other family members who might struggle with those steps.
Sarah: So listeners, you may be thinking about what options are out there for your steps, solutions for your home. So keep listening because we have ideas coming your way right now.

Rebecca: Yes. So if you’ve listened before, you know we think about the solution options in three layers: No to low cost, mid-range, and structural. And I wanna say upfront that unfortunately, this is one of the features in this series where the no-cost here is pretty limited. So a step is a structural aspect of a home. You can’t rearrange your way out of it the way you can rearrange furniture around a hallway. So we’re gonna spend some more time than usual on the structural tier today ’cause that’s actually where the most optimal [00:10:00] solutions lie. So in the no to low-cost tier, a portable threshold ramp for a single low step can bridge a small rise temporarily. This is particularly effective for a short-term recovery situation, but it’s definitely not a permanent fix, and it won’t work unless a step is pretty low and not super deep. It makes sense to reassess which entrance is being used as the primary one, and you can also decide if a flush side or garage entry could be used as the main arrival point for daily use while you’re planning a permanent fix. For households expecting temporary changes in functionality, such as a short-term post-surgical recovery, a rented home, or something like that, a borrowed portable ramp is a reasonable solution too.

Sarah: Yes, we have a set of ATV ramps that are possible for us to use in certain situations. But the reality of these ramps is that while they are portable, they are quite heavy. I think only one [00:11:00] ramp for me to carry is about 40 pounds, and we need two of them because they’re so narrow.

We have friends who have purchased different lengths of ramps to get themselves into other people’s homes, because most likely they aren’t accessible. And you need the different lengths because you don’t know how many steps are gonna be there. Another friend of ours actually has some spare lumber in his backyard, and was handy enough to make a ramp that was easy to put down when we came over.

We really loved them for that. But that’s not common in every house that you wanna go in. And like you were saying, Rebecca, the solutions in this tier is intentionally thin. We’re not going to pretend there’s a clever rearrangement that solves a step. There isn’t. What this tier buys you is time, and provides you a temporary option.

Rebecca: Right. So moving on to mid-range options. Mid-range changes are really where we start to get somewhere. These mid-range options can include things like landscape grading at the immediate entry point. So [00:12:00] in many cases, the ground around an entrance can be regraded to eliminate or significantly reduce elevation change before it reaches the threshold where you actually walk in the door. And this could be done without a full ramp structure. So this works best when the change in elevation is minimal and the surrounding yard has plenty of room to absorb the slope. Another option is a ramp addition built to meet the entrance. This ramp should have a maximum slope of one to twelve, meaning for every one inch of rise, there is twelve inches of ramp length. But really, one to twenty would be a better target if space allows. Flat landings are required at the top and bottom of the ramp, and handrails on both sides, plus edge protection along any open sides to prevent a wheel or a foot from slipping off the ramp. This tier generally requires some contractor involvement for the ramp to be built, but it doesn’t require the structural changes that a full entry reconfiguration [00:13:00] would.

Sarah: And the one to 12 ratio sounds abstract, until you actually walk it and measure it. For every inch of elevation you need to cover, you need 12 inches or one foot of ramp. A typical two-step rise, somewhere around 14 to 16 inches, would need 14 to 16 feet of ramp at the steepest allowable slope, and closer to 25 to 28 feet if you’re building the gentler one to 20 target.

That’s not a small footprint at all, and it’s exactly why thinking about this at the design stage before any steps ever get built changes everything about what’s possible. Scott wrote a great blog post in our learning community that talks about why steps are needed in the first place. It’s basically the house being built upon layer by layer, making everything rise up higher than the ground.
I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for you to read if you’re interested.

Rebecca: Awesome. But to add to Sarah’s [00:14:00] comment about the slope, yes, technically a one to 12 slope for a ramp meets the code, but it doesn’t actually work for everyone. So propelling up a one to 12 ratio slope is a lot tougher than propelling up a ratio one to 20 slope. So that one to 12 might not work for someone with limited upper body strength propelling a manual wheelchair. It might not work for someone with endurance limitations. It certainly wouldn’t work on a fall day with wet leaves on the path or an icy winter day with a slippery path. So that’s why it’s always easier to build with a one to 20 ratio if possible.

Sarah: And if you’re curious about what that feels like, most public spaces have that one to 12 slope. So if you wanna take a chance and try it out, go into different public places and, give it a try to see what works best for you. So really, the order of preference is grade the site if you can, build a gentler ramp if you [00:15:00] can’t, and only fall back to the steeper slope when space genuinely doesn’t allow anything else.

Rebecca: Right. So that wraps up our mid-range changes. Let’s move on to structural changes, which is where, yes, the pricey work begins, but also the really impactful work begins, especially if you’re thinking about starting with a new build. So structural changes are where we can solve this issue the most permanently, but it’s also where the cost argument matters most for anyone building right now. Eliminating elevation changes at the entrance from the start is a great option. This happens in collaboration with a landscaping team and eliminates the need for co- a compensatory ramp from the get-go. So this is the gold standard solution. When it’s done at the design stage, it often costs little to nothing more than standard grading would have cost anyway. Another option is a ramp that’s designed as part of the architecture itself, not added afterward. This way, the ramp can be intentionally designed instead [00:16:00] of retrofitted. The approximate cost range for a built-in architectural ramp addition is somewhere in the range of three thousand to fifteen thousand, depending on the rise, the length, and the materials, though this number drops significantly when it’s planned during the initial construction rather than added later. For spaces where grading or adding a ramp isn’t feasible, a platform lift can be a good option. So this is a small powered platform that raises a person and their mobility device vertically to meet the entry level. So platform lifts are more compact than a full ramp, but they require electrical work and ongoing maintenance, so many people find them slower and less convenient for daily use than a ramp. There’s also a stair lift, which carries a seated person up a set of stairs but doesn’t accommodate a wheelchair itself. For this reason, a stair lift is a poor fit for full-time wheelchair users and is better suited for ambulatory individuals with limited stamina or [00:17:00] balance.

So here’s a core consideration for builders and designers. Every one of these solutions costs dramatically less when it’s part of the original site plan than when it’s added to a home that was built with steps already in place. Eliminating the steps at the design stage is frequently the same cost as building the step because grading happens either way. The cost only appears once the step already exists and has to be undone.

Sarah: Plus, when you think about it at this stage, thinking ahead, you can make this home look like any other house in the neighborhood, which is what most people desire and why some people drag their feet in making changes. Because the style of an add-on ramp and lifts looks medical and less desirable when they have to do it later as a retrofit.

When you do an add-on, this also signals to others looking outside from the house in that somebody might not be as capable physically, and it could be a security risk [00:18:00] for those with bad intentions if you have a ramp just kind of slapped on the front of the house.

But really, some creativity and work during the design stage creates some really nice-looking access options that don’t have to look ugly and medical, and it doesn’t cost the homeowner as much money later.

Rebecca: And if you wanna see what this actually looks like done well, the style guide has a section on entrance routes that’s definitely worth pulling up. There are examples of graded approaches and integrated ramps that don’t look anything like the institutional images people have in their heads. Some of them you’d walk right past without even realizing there’s no steps.
Sarah: Definitely. And I love seeing examples of those. So log into our community and show us some examples if you have one. So if you were gonna take anything away from today, let it be this: before you finalize a site plan, a landscape design, or even a list of must-haves for a renovation, ask whether your main entrance has a step [00:19:00] or more.

If it does, ask whether grading the site instead of building the step costs anything more.

Rebecca: So back to Dominic, who we talked about a little bit earlier. Dominic still uses his garage door most days, by the way. Old habits die hard, and honestly, it’s covered, which makes life easier for him. But what he actually wants isn’t a workaround that works well. It’s a front door he can walk or roll right through, just like everybody else who visits his home. you want to see where your own approach falls on this spec, our home survey is a good starting point. Remember, it’s not a full inspection, but it is a good place to start from. It’s a good way to flag areas worth taking a closer look at, and we also have a link from a community post that has a full ramp and a link from our specifications page for grading details if you’re working with a contractor on this. Thanks for listening, and we will be back in our feed soon to continue our journey through an accessible home. See you next time.

Sarah: Thanks for listening to Good Fit Poor Fit. If you want to learn more… first, find more [00:20:00] episodes with transcripts and show notes at goodfitpoorfit.com. Don’t forget to subscribe! Second, check out our courses at universaldesign.org.

We cover housing topics like advocacy, collaboration, home modification, universal design and task adaptations. Lastly, if you have questions or topics you’d like us to discuss, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for fitting us into your day.