Home improvements that make living easier at every age

Collaborative Post | You don't need a health scare to start thinking differently about your home.  A lot of the improvements that make daily life easier in your fifties, sixties and beyond are quietly practical rather than dramatic, the sort of thing you barely notice until you've had them fitted. Here's where to start.

Photo by Sanibell BV on Unsplash

1. Sort the bathroom out properly

The bathroom is where most home accidents happen, and it's usually down to slippery flooring, awkward baths, or grout that's gone black and never really comes clean no matter how hard you scrub. Rather than retiling, more people are switching to waterproof wall panelling, which seals completely and skips the grout lines altogether.

Companies such as Lawcris make this kind of grout-free, wipe-clean surface for exactly this reason, and it works just as well behind a walk-in shower as it does around a traditional bath. Pair it with a low-threshold shower tray and you've removed two of the biggest hazards in one go.

2. Widen the pinch points

Standard doorways are around 76cm wide, which is fine until you're carrying shopping bags, using a stick, or need a bit more room to manoeuvre.

Widening a hallway or bathroom doorway by even a few centimetres, and swapping a step for a gentle slope where you can, makes a genuine difference without changing how the room looks day to day.

3. Layer your lighting, don't just brighten it

Ageing eyes need roughly twice as much light as they did at thirty to see comfortably, but the fix isn't one harsh overhead bulb.

Add task lighting under kitchen cabinets, a low-level nightlight in the hallway, and a switch by the bed rather than one across the room. Falls at night, often on the way to the loo, are among the most common and the most preventable.

4. Fit grab rails while you don't need them

There's a persistent idea that grab rails are for "later," which is exactly why they tend to go in after an accident rather than before one. The Centre for Ageing Better has found that removing serious fall hazards from older people's homes could save the NHS hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

A discreet rail by the front step or the stairs costs very little and looks entirely ordinary once it's up.

5. Bring the washing machine upstairs, or at least the essentials

If your laundry lives in a downstairs utility and your bedroom's on the first floor, you're doing that staircase run constantly.

A small stacked washer-dryer tucked into an upstairs cupboard, even just for towels and bedding, cuts out one more repeated trip.

6. Think about flooring before furniture

According to NICE guidance emergency hospital admissions for falls in the over-65s run into the hundreds of thousands every year, and loose rugs and thick pile carpet are frequent culprits. Low-pile carpet or textured vinyl grips better underfoot than anything with a deep pile or a curling edge, and it's one of the cheaper changes on this list.

None of this needs doing all at once. Pick the room that worries you most and start there.


Disclaimer: this is a collaborative post.