It’s Wednesday morning, and there’s a man in my kitchen. I’m usually home alone until about noon, but today is different, because Sal has come to patch up something like 60 divots and gouges throughout our recently renovated house. We were not attacked by starving woodland animals, nor was this the result of drunk Christmas tree decorating or anything to do with the resident 4-year-old. Let me explain.

In 2013, it was getting really hard for me to climb stairs. We lived on the second floor of an old Victorian in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. One flight up to our door, another flight up to our home. As my legs grew weaker, it became clear that we needed to move. But there we faced a different kind of challenge: finding an accessible place to live in San Francisco, city of hills, multi-story homes and steep staircases. We were still searching when I lost my stair climbing abilities entirely. Rob carried me up and down two flights, every day. Over and over.

Finally we found a home that fit our needs. Set in an area of the city that we were completely unfamiliar with, it had a suburban feel. This was both good—detached houses, yards—and bad—not within walking distance of coffee shops and restaurants. But for us, the choice was easy. I hadn’t walked to a coffee shop for some time anyway. We consulted with our broker and put in an offer we hoped they couldn’t refuse.

Sadly, we learned that we were not the highest bidders. That was the first piece of information I received from Rob, who has not yet embraced the “good news first” style of communication. He followed up by telling me that the house was ours, if we wanted it. I had written a letter to the owner, explaining our situation, and she decided to sell to us.

It’s a ranch, the only one-story house I’ve ever seen in the city, making it the perfect place for us, especially if you consider our utter desperation at the time of purchase (when the word “acceptable” was starting to take on new meaning.) The house was more than acceptable, and it came with ocean views. But it needed work to make it accessible, which included tearing down walls and bumping the back further out to make the rooms big enough to accommodate the wheelchair we feared was coming.

While the house was being rebuilt, we moved into a small, soulless apartment with an elevator. That’s where we were living when I got my walker. And it’s where we were still living, 6 months later, when I got my wheelchair. Eventually, our house was ready, and although I had dreamed of being able to stand up and move around inside of it, by the time we got there, I was permanently seated.

When you move into a new house with a child, or children, you might expect that pretty soon there will be marker on the walls, food in the crevices of major appliances, fingerprints on the windows. You don’t necessarily assume that someone will be learning to drive what is essentially an ATV up and down the hall and through doorways technically wide enough for such a device, but only if you enter at the perfect angle. Our nice, new house was my practice ground for wheelchair training, and the damage was not insignificant.

Enter Sal from the painting company. He is filling, sanding, and repainting all of the marks I’ve made. Which means that I need to start operating my vehicle more carefully. Minimal texting and driving. Drinking and driving, definitely, but slowly. Eyes forward, so that I don’t ram into our new bookshelf when I’m craning my neck to make a smart-ass comment to a friend. Again.

This house we felt almost forced into buying because of our situation has become the center of my universe. We aren’t able to visit most of our friends, people who live in your average San Francisco home of rampant staircases. So they come to us, and we are deeply appreciative of that fact. We want our house to be comfortable and inviting, to look nice, to have all of its wall chunks in their proper places. Much of that is already taken care of, thanks to a fantastic designer (shout out to Studio Munroe) and Rob’s exacting eye. I don’t have the skill of home design and I can’t even fluff a pillow, so my job is pretty much not running into stuff. And I am determined to get better at it.

Share this post on your social platform