An Accessible Apartment

Today I spent much of the day at my new apartment.  I finished the cleaning (all I had left to do was vacuum and wipe out the kitchen cabinets).  I had some groceries and other items to put away, once I finished wiping out the cabinets. That was actually kind of fun.  Strange how that works.  It's normally not so much fun to put away groceries but in my new place, deciding where everything would go, it was kind of nice.

I washed my new dishes, too.  Well, they aren't exactly new, but they are new to me.  I got them free off of FreeCycle.  See, aren't they pretty?  I really, really like them.

My apartment is built to be accessible.  There are the grab bars in the tub and around the toilet, which I've mentioned previously that I don't like.  They might come in handy; today I took a shower at my apartment and I discovered I can put shampoo bottles on the bars and then I can reach them without bending over, the way I have to bend over a bit to reach the shampoo if I keep it on the edge of the tub.  I still don't like the way they look, though.

The doorways are all wide, so wheelchairs can fit through them easily.  The door handles are the kind that you push down on, instead of knobs that you turn.  That way people with poor manual dexterity can open the doors.  The bathroom is kind of big, which I like; it's the only room in the house that's not tiny.  But it's big enough for a wheelchair to fit in there.

When I was putting things away, though, it occurred to me that I can put things wherever I want.  It's just me living there (well, me and Isaac and Cayenne), so I can decide where everything goes.  That means I can store things where I can easily reach them, without having to bend over.  I guess I could have made more of an effort to do that in my old house, but we already had places for everything before my back got so bad.  I moved some things as my back got worse, but never got around to rearranging everything.  Plus, it wasn't just my house; things were where Mike liked them to be, too.  Also, I didn't have a lot of kitchen cabinets at my old house; my new apartment has a teeny tiny kitchen, but somehow it has a lot of cabinet space.  I'm probably going to end up not having much in the lower cabinets, because it's so hard to bend over to get things.  There should be plenty of room in the cabinets above the counter for the things I use regularly.

I wonder how much better my back with feel, when I don't have to bend for things all the time?