Holiday visitations
Coming off of many months of less than normal travel and interaction, people are looking forward to seeing loved ones this holiday season and being in each other’s company. Still, there are some considerations that we need to examine.
As anyone – from a distant relative, a frequent guest, a neighbor, or others – comes to our homes to enjoy the yearend festivities with us, we need to make sure they don’t have any unnecessary barriers to overcome in terms of accessing and navigating our homes.
The importance of visitability
As people are coming to our homes to share the happy moments of the festive season with us, they need to be able to join us inside our homes without any challenges. It may have been a little while since some of us have seen each other face-to-face. A lot can happen.
Maybe the last time we saw someone they were able to climb the steps into our home, but now that will be a more serious challenge for them. Maybe their vision or balance has declined a little.
The best way we can help to ensure that all of our guests can access our homes and our living space well is by creating and establishing a visitable design – one that permits anyone to easily and safely enter our home and participate in the inside activities.
Visitability is always in style
While visitability takes on a renewed and heightened importance this time of year due to people going to one another’s homes to celebrate the holidays, visitability is never out-of-style. We don’t de-emphasize it in January only to bring it back into the discussion once or twice later in the year – such as now when people typically go to each other’s homes to spend time with them to celebrate an event, holiday, or time of year.
Safety is always in vogue, and along with safety inside a person’s home is getting to and through the front door easily and safely, whether the person doing so lives there or not and whether there are any physical limitations affecting them.