Something we have incorporated into our most recent renovations is accessibility, and to make this fun for everyone, my latest blog post contains a musical parody element—so everybody sing along to the tune of ‘Safety Dance’ by those ‘80s one-hit wonders, Men Without Towels…I mean, Hats.

We can bath if we want to
We can leave your friends behind,
‘Cause your friends don’t bath and if they don’t bath
Well they’re no friends of mine
Safety Bath…it’s Safety Bath
Safety Bath…oh, Safety Bath!

Now that we’ve got the new flooring done in the bedsitting room, we’d like to get rid of the last evidence of vinyl flooring that covered the space, and that would be what remains in the adjoining bathroom.
We have plans to lay tile (probably white hex) and will probably incorporate radiant floor heating like we did in our upstairs bathroom a few years ago.
But something we’ve been looking at closely is the bathtub and its aging, fugly plastic surround.

This bathroom, by design, is an accessible one—there’s room to maneuver a wheelchair into the room, and it features a sliding pocket door, higher height toilet seat and grab-bars around the tub. When we saw this house, we thought it would suit our needs for a long time to come, since we have, in recent years, become a ‘sandwich’ family, caring for both a young child and an aging parent.
My mother-in-law will be 81 this year, and is experiencing increasing difficulties getting in and out of the tub. After her husband passed away, John was traveling into the city regularly to do simple home maintenance tasks she wasn’t able to, like changing a blown light bulb in a ceiling fixture. We decided it made sense to have her move in with us, since my husband is her only surviving family.
We’d like to ensure that she’s able to live independently for as long as possible without frustrations, so we’ve started looking at replacing the tub with a walk-in tub. Most designs we’ve seen have serious flaws—most notably an inward-swinging door, making it difficult should the tub’s occupant ever faint (or worse) and need assistance.

We recently discovered the Safety Bath, which seems to address these issues and actually doesn’t look too bad (as far as these types of tubs go). The tub has a very small footprint, allowing for side access in a typical 5-foot tub space, and although the company sells a skirting kit to finish off that extra space when retrofitting the tub, we think we would tile the floor instead (maybe add a nice hex tile motif in that space?).
Yesterday, John traveled to a specialty plumbing distributor in Cobourg with his mom (about an hour’s drive) to see one of the actual tubs (we’d enquired about them, and the manufacturer said they would contact us the next time one was shipped close to our area). Both John and his mother seemed satisfied with the quality and operation, and Deirdre (who was with them), thinks it will be like having an indoor hot tub (yes, it has massage jets).
If you visit the Safety Bath website, you can watch a short video about this innovative, Canadian-made product. Some of it’s boring, so you can sing the ‘Safety Bath’ song that we made up when we were watching it.
Here’s a company crying out for some slicker marketing. Great product, terrible product photography and a cheesy (albeit informative) budget video. They should really use our song!

I’ll apologize now for putting that tune in your head for the rest of the day.

technorati tags: home+renovation, accessibility, independent+living