Ready, Willing and Able continued

Details make a difference
“Making do” is the solution for many families with a disabled family member, but the features that can make a house truly functional are often inexpensive when taken into consideration in the design stage of construction. Kylie Norton’s home is the fifth wheelchair-accessible home Trinity Habitat has constructed, and the affiliate has found good planning to be essential.

“The significant difference in planning for a wheelchair-accessible home is that there are unique needs specific to each wheelchair-mobile person,” executive director Michelle Kennedy says. “As a result, every step in the footprint of the home has to be considered. To that end, we need the homeowner’s input from the very beginning on all modifications.”

Norton’s home includes several features to make it safe and comfortable:

• Wider hallways and doors
• Larger bathroom and roll-in shower
• Pedestal sink
• Undercut kitchen sink
• Lower peephole in door
• Remote thermostat
• Lower light switches
• Higher electrical outlets
• Rolled access entrance.

Volunteer Stan Powell has helped build more than 200 Habitat houses in Nashville, Tenn.

These features, though ordinary and practical, communicated an extraordinary message of care to Norton. “I feel I am an example and that I have something to live up to,” she says. “Through building this house, I really feel extra special. I haven’t felt special since the accident.

“I am excited that I will have a wide expanse of capability in terms of mobility,” she continues. “The kitchen in the new house is so huge. Also, I will able to do some gardening and some landscaping that I have never been able to do before.”

Coming full circle
In some ways, volunteering for Habitat is one of the more normal things Stan Powell does. Powell was in graduate school when a tingling sensation in his feet eventually led to a diagnosis of a rare type of arteriovenous malformation. After a surgery in 1977 that saved his life but left him paralyzed, he finished his doctoral work in aerospace and mechanical engineering. He currently works at a military base in Tennessee testing model rockets to determine how they perform under different variables.

A one-day stint of volunteering on-site with his church in 2000 led to another volunteering opportunity in 2001. Since then, Powell has had a hand in constructing some 200 houses with Nashville Habitat for Humanity, and he says it’s the homeowners and volunteers who keep him motivated to drive more than an hour each way for a weekend of building.

“When the alarm goes off and I get up, I wonder, ‘Do I really want to be doing this? This bed feels awfully good,’” he says. “But when you get to the job site and see the partner family’s faces and see how big a deal this is to them, you realize, ‘Yeah, I do really want to do this. This is worth the trouble.’”

Though there have been a couple of other volunteers who use wheelchairs through the years, Powell is usually the only visibly disabled volunteer on the build site — a distinction that tends to attract attention.

“If you think about it, somebody in a wheelchair on a construction site strains credibility — it’s something you just don’t see,” Powell says. “It’s a difficult thing to do, and it depends on the local affiliate and the regular volunteers being willing to accept something a little bit different, being willing to work with the differences and limitations, and it takes someone in a wheelchair willing to do the extra work and be a little more stubborn about it.”

When it comes to construction, there are a few tasks Powell leaves to the other volunteers — roof decking, for example. And since the final grading on the lots often hasn’t been finished, getting around the back of the houses he supervises can be a challenge, especially if it’s muddy. However, the “regulars” are familiar with Powell’s capabilities and “don’t give it a second thought,” he says.

For many people who use wheelchairs, their lives fall into a distinct “before and after” — before the accident, before the illness, before the diagnosis that introduced a future they never imagined. But Habitat also can establish a new set of “befores” and “afters.” Habitat-style community — that sort that works through hammers and screws and paintbrushes — redeems a home from a place of constant reminders of out-of-reach capabilities to a place where an individual, whether homeowner or volunteer, is empowered. It becomes a place to live out the philosophy that, as Powell says, “Giving back is part of the responsibility for living.”