FHA 203K Loans Explained: Part 1 | Making A Home Handicap Acessible

Love the house but worried it isn't wheelchair accessible? In this episode, we explain how an FHA renovation loan can help transform a home into one that meets your family's accessibility needs. From adding permanent ramps and widening doorways to remodeling kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms, bedrooms, and outdoor spaces, you'll learn how accessibility improvements can be financed as part of your home purchase. Whether you're planning for a loved one or your own future needs, this walkthrough shows how you can buy the home you love and customize it for safe, comfortable, and independent living.

Transcript

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Hey everyone. Welcome back to All Things Home Loans, Credit, and Real Estate. I am your host, Deb, the Mortgage Queen. So let's start learning. Love the house, love the location. Absolutely a problem because it's not handicap accessible. Let's walk through how a renovation loan can do that for you. This is a little bit near and dear to my heart for two reasons. My mom is at some point probably going to be in a wheelchair just because of her physical things that have happened to her. And then also my father-in-law had a massive stroke years ago, and he was in a situation where we had to have all the extra things for accessibility in our home. And luckily we were able to kind of maneuver that a little bit. But when we built our home, we built for the plan of having the ability to have a wheelchair go through hallways and doorways. So all of our doorways are wide. But let's walk through what it looks like if you have a handicap accessibility issue in a home that you absolutely love. The location's wonderful. What do we do so we can help that home become handicap accessible for your family member? And for the sake of me being able to explain this, let's say my husband's handicap accessible because I would really rather talk about somebody in kind of a first-person situation. So we find the house we love, we love the location of where it's at, we walk through it. The problem is, is we know from our experience what is required to be able to get a wheelchair through that house. The doorways to the bathroom aren't big enough, the around the kitchen cabinets aren't big enough, the ability for him to get to the dinner table isn't big enough. And overall, we just have to open some things up, let alone the ramp to get into the house has got to be dealt with as well. The program that we've got, FHA Renovation Loan, allows handicap accessibility to be a part of the scope of work. Let's walk through from the outside in to the house and what we could do. Now, obviously, you've got to put on the hat. Some people may just have a walker. And maybe your family member needs a wheelchair. Maybe it's a motorized wheelchair, maybe it's a wheelchair that you've got to push in yourself. You've got to get this person up. Walking into a home that even has two or three stairs, because most homes have two or three stairs. It's really hard to get a wheelchair up some stairs. It really is. So if we have to get a ramp, it gives us the ability from the outside in to create a ramp. Now it's got to be a fix to the home. It's not one that we can just have detach and attach. It needs to be attached to the home. What about the front door? What if the front door isn't big enough for us to be able to get that wheelchair through? Maybe it's an older home and it had a 2-8 opening instead. I don't know that they probably did it back then, but we've got to have a 3-0 opening. We've got to have a three-foot wide opening to be able to get that uh wheelchair through. If we need to increase the front door size, we're going to increase the front door size. As we walk through this house, we are now sitting in the living room, which is okay. Most living rooms are big enough that you can turn circles in a wheelchair in that. But then let's go into the kitchen. Kitchens are funny in some of these older houses because they were so tight. And maybe there's an island in the way. Maybe we need to move that island to more of a straight cabinet. Maybe we need to just rip out all of the cabinets so that we have the ability for things to be more narrow so that the wheelchair can get around. What about from the kitchen to the dining room? Do we need to open up the kitchen a little bit so that we can get from the kitchen to the dining room in a wheelchair? Very possible, something that could be done. What if there's carpet from the main area to the kitchen? Well, let's put it into hardwood so that you don't have to push so hard on that wheelchair. Let's put it into hardwood. Let's put it into some sort of a hard surface so that the wheelchair can maneuver completely. Carpet can go away completely. Walking down the hallway. This is one that's going to be interesting because we can't really eliminate walls because most of those walls are probably bearing. If you have a hallway, hopefully they've made it wide enough that you can get your wheelchair down that. But let's turn into the bathroom. Most bathrooms, 99% of the bathrooms, have a little kitchen or excuse me, a little sink, a toilet, and a really standard bathtub that you can't get a wheelchair in. So as we're walking through that, we look at, well, let's take that counter out that our sink is in and let's put more of a sink that's attached to the wall so a wheelchair can go right up to it. Toilet, maybe we have to raise it. Let's get a higher toilet so that you have the ability to move from your wheelchair and into the toilet area in that situation. Now let's talk about that bathtub. Your standard bathtub has to be ripped out. You can't, for the most part, if somebody's in a wheelchair, it's really hard to transfer them from the wheelchair to a standard bathtub if you've got to go up over that hump. So let's get rid of that bathtub completely. And we can either tile in more of like a walk-in-shower type thing. So you can just drive your wheelchair right in there. Maybe we put a little bit of a lip because of the desire to do that. Either way, you have the ability to take out just that standard bathtub and put a shower in. We also have those really cool bathtubs that we can stick in that have the ability to have like doors. So if you want a soaker tub in there, then we can look at putting one of those tubs in there that has those sealed doors. Um, those are way cool. I only saw it on a late night commercial, so that was really cool. So the bathtub and the bathroom completely being able to be renovated that way. What about the laundry room? Sometimes those laundry rooms are just stuffed in little closets. Do we have any room in that laundry room that we can have the ability for this person to be able to throw laundry in the washing machine? Do we put stackable washing machines down that are not stackable? Maybe we put them side by side so that you have the ability to do it in a front end load and we get the machines that have the buttons on the front of both of them so they have the ability to do their laundry. How cool would that be to have him be able to do his own laundry? Now in the bedroom, we would want to look at what the closet looks like. If it's just your standard closet that's just two feet deep, eh, maybe just what it is. If it's a walk-in closet, do we need to rip out some of the shelves? Do we need to move some of the shelves down? Even in your standard two-foot closet, do we need to create a bottom shelf so that maybe his clothes hang on the bottom and your clothes hang on the top? Little shelves, move shelves around. How about the back patio? We go out the back patio and it's three stairs down and we can't get him three stairs down. All right, well, what if we lift that patio up so it's at the same level you're going out the door? What if we take out that one doorway and turn it into more of a French door? And you have the ability to open both of those doors and you can just wheel right out right on that patio. All those things can be done to make that house handicap accessible, and it all can be done with a house as is, with the contractor walking through and saying, Hey, this is what I gotta have done. This is how much it's gonna cost. And we finance the money that you need to turn that home that you love into a home that you can actually enjoy with your loved one that's in a wheelchair. Handicap accessibility is part of that renovation loan, and it's awesome. Let your mind wander. We can make it happen. So today we've talked about handicap accessibility. What if all we wanted to do is just rip out the kitchen and start over? Next time we're gonna talk about what we do to a kitchen to have it be completely different from where you saw it when you originally walked in. Until then, keep learning. Let's go. Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate it. So stay tuned. We are gonna learn some more next time.