Home accessibility mods

[elizilla]

Apparently you can now get a futuristic lift tube style glass elevator for your house. This is an actual real thing and not prohibitively expensive.

Glass Elevator

It is pneumatic. A vacuum in the attic sucks the air out from above the car and this pulls it upwards. So it doesn't need a box full of cables and pulleys on the roof, or a special machine room in the basement.

We'll know the price has come down enough when the people who hack up old houses into multiple hideous apartments, start installing these instead of inappropriate and rickety staircases.

Comments

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

[elizilla]

If it lets me stay in my house long term, it gets my attention. I have sent them a request for a quote to find out what "inexpensive" means. It's not just these sales guys calling it inexpensive; it's being talked about on ADA advice sites, and I first heard about it by word of mouth. But what dollar figure are they really talking about?

It certainly looks science fiction-y. I'd love to go somewhere that has one, see it in action, and actually try it.

The skinniest one is only 20" in diameter, inside. It's 30" diameter, outside. That sounds kinda anxiety-inducing, but it means it's small enough to fit in a corner, instead of dominating a room. Then there are intermediate sizes and eventually one large enough to fit a wheelchair. I'm not in a wheelchair now but that could happen someday.

Since it's glass, we don't have to find a spot that doesn't occlude any windows. Though if you stuff it into a corner, how do you clean back there? What if you want to paint the room a different color and need to get at the wall behind it? I suppose there will be time enough to ask all those questions if we actually pursue it. :-)

[the-rigger.livejournal.com]

I see the smallest one only has a 350lb. lift rating... That really isn't much.

[elizilla]

We enjoyed the technical documentation on their site, much nicer than just fluffy advertising stuff. But it tells us it would be exceedingly challenging to shoehorn one into our house. The bottom floor needs to be two inches taller than our basement is, and part of the goal would be to get to the basement with it. So we'd have to be jackhammering up the basement floor. And finding a vertical space that accesses all three floors that isn't making us reconfigure the entire house, is tough.

Meanwhile their quote request tool gets no response - they are blowing us off.

I think this is something to shove off into the distant future and worry about later. But it's cool to know it exists. Maybe by the time we need it, it'll be more inexpensive still, and they'll have models that are slightly less tall. And as we do other things, we'll keep the eventual possibility of needing a location for an elevator shaft, in our minds.