The journey of finding an accessible home can be an extremely difficult challenge for people with disabilities. The journey often involves deciding which route to take. Purchasing an existing home and modifying it or building a home and having the home adaptations built into the home design. Often, this decision can come down to location, availability, budget, and the time commitment. Now, let’s take all that mental wear and tear and add school age children to the mix. Mind blown? Stress eat? Please by all means. Glass of wine? Stock up!
This is the first part of a multi-part series. I will take you through our experience from the decision to move and all the way to the final home and showing you the accessible features in our new home.
My wife and I purchased our first home in 2005. At the time, having children was not on our radar at all. In fact, we had the thought of never having kids. We were both very involved in our careers. With that said, when we bought our first home we did not take into account the school district nor did we consider if there were kids in the area where we were looking. At that time we only had 2 items on our checklist. One the house had to be accessible and second a reasonable travel time to and from our jobs.
Fast forward 7 years, life happens, and our minds change about having children. BAM! In 2012 our son was born and we became parents and our entire mindset and priorities were turned on their heads! When our son turned 5 and was starting kindergarten we realized that we were not in the greatest school cluster. My wife and I came to the conclusion that by the time our son reached the 5th grade we needed to move to a better school cluster.
We knew it would take a little while so we wanted to get an early start to meet our 5th grade goal. So our house hunting began at the beginning of our son’s 3rd grade year in school. We knew the general area we wanted to move into, so it was just a matter of finding homes in that area. We, along with our agent, met with a number of developers and builders. We kept getting rejected regarding customizing a floorplan to meet our accessibility needs.
A few weeks before everything shutdown due to the pandemic I was running some errands in the area we were interested in and I passed by a development that was in its really early phase – they were just clearing the land. Anyway, I pulled over on the side of the road and took a picture of the sign and sent it to our agent. Once everything shut down I forgot about it and honestly moving was put on the back burner several months until the country came out of lock down.
Our agent called me outta the blue one day and asked if we were still interested in the development I sent him. We said absolutely! He said he had been talking to the on-site agent and the corporate team assigned to the development would like to meet with us!
As I said in the beginning this is a multi part series. In my next post, I will share with you how the meeting went and what it led to.
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