Losing the physical self

The work to convert our garage into a living space for Anita was recently completed. As time has gone on it was getting more important to create a space suitable for her. Having a bed in the lounge for so long was just to uncomfortable. We decide to let the Bedford branch of the Garage Conversion Company take the strain of doing the development. They did an excellent job and made the whole thing look easy. It was a little uncomfortable for a while having them digging up our garden but now it’s done it’s a fantastic space. Realising we would never get any government funding to do the work we had to bite the bullet and get it sorted. It’s not something we would have chosen to do previously but now it’s done I can see the sense in doing a conversion, we all use our small garages only to store rubbish anyway. The conversion costed us around 13.5k and we did save some money on the VAT relief. You are allowed zero rated VAT but only on the installation of the bathroom which counted no more than 5% of the overall cost.

During the conversion there was various visits from OT’s so that they could input into the layout. The bathroom was made a little bigger and the toilet centred on the room. They supplied drop down handles for the sides of the toilet. I have learned that the positioning of everything is very important and can be quite difficult to determine because it all depends on how Anita will transfer herself in the future. I would urge people doing something similar to make sure that they give this some thought. The shower and sink where fitted low down so that it was best for Anita and now she has been able to have a shower for the first time in ages! Without the shower she would have only ever been able to wash herself in bed which is not very nice.

You can see the full photo set of the conversion on flickr.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 9th, 2005 at 1:37 am and is filed under Paperwork. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.