Mar
Livable and Accessible Housing Guidelines for Queenslander Renovations
– My name’s Jan Hogarth from PlaceMate Architects. I’m a renovation residential specialist architect working in Brisbane. We get asked a lot about how to prepare a forever home, mostly in the case of a renovation because, by definition, it’s a forever home. You wanna stay there as long as you can. You’re preparing for yourself as long as you can and your family and friends for as long as you can. So this is the strategies that you prepare, the things that you need to watch out for if you want to build a forever home, and a lot of it is about accessibility.
Recently, the building guidelines, the building rules for building applications, have been started to include accessibility guidelines.
This will be part of the approval process that a building certifier looks for in a building application.
Now, many people regard this as an annoying bureaucratic detail. However, think of it like this: These rules have been tested for a long time, and they are set up to prevent people having to move out of their house at short notice because there’s a trip hazard or they can’t even get into their houses. This is what these regulations have been set up for. Right, building rules changed to include accessibility in housing. So any building application has to be assessed for accessibilities, just like it is for structure and energy. And the new rules are applicable to everyone building habitable spaces. Right, so your first point, if you’re going to look into this, is the Livable Housing Guidelines. There is an awesome government brochure under https://livablehousingaustralia.org.au that has great pictures, great documents, and a great strategy in it. Now, it’s not saying that everything has to be disabled access like a hospital. They have three levels: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. And you can choose your level. Silver is just what should apply to everybody. But if you’re looking at your family, you might go, actually, with our family history of, let’s say, arthritis or whatever you’ve got potentially coming down the track, you might pick a higher level for yourself. And then you apply these rules consistently. So it doesn’t need to be alarmist. It’s really helpful.
The core elements of the accessibility guidelines, there’s seven of them.
How you get into the house, how you come in the front door, how you move around the house, go to the loo, have a shower, can you use put in a grab rail, and also stairwells. And I’d talk about lifts for that as well. We’re gonna talk about each one of these in detail. Right, the first one we have is dwelling access. The idea here is that anybody can pull up at your footpath and get into your house. Now, if you happen to live in an elevated Queenslander that’s up on stumps and there’s dirt in underneath and all the living areas and bedrooms are upstairs, actually, there is nothing that anyone can do to make you put in disability access. However, if you decide to raise the house and put in any kind of habitable room, that’s a bedroom or a living room, you are obligated to have accessible entry into that house and an accessible bathroom. There only needs to be one accessible bathroom in your house. It could be an en suite; it could be a bathroom. And it’s actually not a bad idea if you’re future-proofing your house that somewhere downstairs, let’s say you broke both your legs, you could live down there. So think about it that way. So the second point we have is the dwelling entrance.
Accessible dwelling entrances
You should be able to get into your house through a door, right? How hard can that be? Ah-ha, don’t get me started. All right, for a start, the dimensions of the doors have to be now a clear dimension. So it’s not just the size of the door; it’s the frame around the door. So really watch that. So the door sizes have gotten that little bit bigger, which is a real nuisance in a renovation. Now, the other thing is, imagine the wheelie walker or someone on crutches. It’s the step at the front door that’s a hassle. Now, in a Queenslander, by definition, the house is often timber. You wanna have a separation between the ground and a timber floor because of termites, right? So even if you’ve got the level coming up and you’ve got a ramp and it’s nice and smooth, the last thing you want is your timber house touching the dirt so that termites can get through. Put a grate in between those two. Now, sometimes people go, “No problem, I’ve got a concrete floor, I’ll just smooth up.” Well, the reason that it wasn’t built that way to start with was because there’s supposed to be a water barrier so wind-blown rain can’t just blow into your house and get in underneath the floor and underneath your carpet or whatever, and cause long-term damage. So there needs to be a separation for the water to not blow in or, you know, just dirt in underneath the door. So again, we propose a trough in in front of that so that you can have a removable grate that you can take out, and you can separate the ground and the house. The other thing is, have a look at the thresholds of the door so you haven’t got a trip hazard. So that’s like the door is here, there’s a piece of timber on it. If you can design it so it’s flat and there’s no trip hazard, great. Sliding doors are a problem because they are, by definition, tracks. You know, there’s a track sitting in there with the doors in it. So now the door manufacturers are changing the way they are made, so it’s much smoother, and sometimes now we set the track down level with the finished level of the floor. The other impact that is for your future-proofing is how thick’s that floor is gonna be. We’ll be asking you right at the beginning: are you gonna have tiles, are you going to have timber? They’re all different thicknesses. And the reason is because you wanna have a smooth surface. So just bear that in mind. How hard can a front door be? That’s your answer. Right, item number three.
Accessible Internal doors and corridors
Internal doors and corridors. Remember how I mentioned the clear space of a door? The old Queenslanders often had 72-centimetre-wide doors, or 720. Now, that’s not regarded as wide enough for accessible access. So reusing your old Queenslander doors may not even be possible. The other thing is, remember the mouldings. The dimension isn’t the size of the door; it’s the size of the framing. And then, around the outside of the door, you often have architraves. So if you widen the door, you’ve got no architraves, and it just looks poxy. I think that’s a technical term. Anyway, so we are having to do more adjustments on the renovations to distinguish what are your accessible doors into the key rooms. So often, they have to be rebuilt, it’s just more cost. Hallways also used to be a standard 90 centimetres wide. Now they have to be one meter wide and clear. Often, in Queenslanders, you’ve got single-skin VJ with, like, rails across. The certifier is obligated to just measure from the tightest point. So you might not have even had 90 centimetres; you might have had 85 centimetres. Ugh, you don’t wanna rebuild the corridor. How will you access these key rooms if you’re actually renovating a Queenslander? This starts to be prohibitive. You might look at building in underneath your house for that kind of reason or building a pod at the back. Right, toilets. Everybody’s familiar with disability-access toilets. They’re around everywhere, and they always feel clinical and like a hospital. You don’t have to have something that’s quite that big. They don’t have to have those horrible surface. What you’re looking for is more space. Now, we also know standard old toilet cubicles. They were 90 centimetres wide; they were 1.5 meters long. That’s not big enough anymore. They need to be that little bit wider, 1 metre, 1.1 metre, and they need to be about 2 metres long. The rule is that there’s 1.5 metres clear in front of the toilet so that someone has got a bit more manoeuvrability on it. Now, remember, it’s not all the toilets, there just needs to be one. But often, if you’re refurbishing a house, you can’t refurbish that particular toilet as the accessibility one. You have to put some one somewhere else in the house to get it to work.
Accessible Bathrooms in a Queenslander
Okay, now comes the big one: bathrooms. Okay, you won’t believe how much time my working life is spent designing tiny bathrooms. It’s all about the detail. So this is the issues that you need to be looking at. If you’re looking at a renovation, particularly of a Queenslander, you’ll be familiar with that situation where you get up in the middle of the night, in the old Queenslander, you can kick your toe at the door with the built-up terrazzo and tile floor that’s there. That is the issue. It’s a trip hazard. So when you’re designing your new renovated bathroom, it means that the floor of the hallway and the tile finish should be flush. Now, by definition, it used to be there was the timber floor and the tiles were put on top. Now the whole floor structure has to be lower so that you can get the cement floor with a fall down to your waste and the tiles on top to be level so that there’s no trip hazard there. The worst-case scenario is the shower because the shower will be falling down to a drain at the bottom. This has the impact of having to gut the entire room. The floor, the walls will have to go because when you take off the tiles, the membrane underneath, the waterproof membrane, has to be replaced, and it has to be continuous from the floor and up the walls. So it means there’s no really easy way to renovate a bathroom. The whole thing gets taken back to structure and rebuilt.
Reinforcement of bathroom walls
Okay, the next item is reinforcement of bathroom walls. If you’re future-proofing your home, you need grab rails, or you might need grab rails. So what happens is that where they screw them into the walls, there needs to be a bit of guts in the wall for you to place the screws. And you don’t know which handrail you’re gonna be using. It might be a square one, it might be a bent one. Who knows? What side it’s gonna be on? The guidelines ask that the wall thicknesses behind the plasterboard have got a layer of plywood in there. So beneath the tiles, there’s something solid for things to be screwed into at a later date. Now, the effect of that is the wall surfaces have got a little bit thicker, which again impacts the width of the room. So that the dimensions, if you’ve got a tiny bathroom already, the walls might have to shift out to just fit a compliant bathroom in there. So really pay a bit of attention to that because it has an impact on the design. If you’ve got a tiny bathroom beside a tiny bedroom and the bathroom walls go out, you might not be able to fit a bed in the room next door. So it just has an impact on cost and construction all the way through the building. So when your floor level comes down from your tiles and the floor and everything, the drainage from the shower also goes down a bit so that the cover underneath that ceiling to hide the pipes can get a little bit lower as well. Now, this might impact on the ceiling height of the room underneath the bathroom so that it can no longer be called a bedroom anymore. Be very aware of this. This can really come back and bite you when to go to sell. So managing where the floor wastes under your shower are starts to be a bit of a nightmare. So we usually end up putting the showers right over on the side walls so that it doesn’t impact on the ceiling height too much underneath your house. That’s a whole other conversation. We’ll just have to talk about that another day.
Accessible Internal stairs
Internal stairs. Great. Internal stairs. Well, by definition, if you’ve got a trip hazard, you can’t get up the internal stairs. You might have to consider in your house, can you put a nice, long, straight run of stairs in so you could put a stair climber on that? They’re quite handy. They need a bit of space at either end so that little seat comes down, and there’s a bit of maneuvering room at the bottom and a bit of maneuvering room at the top. That’s a possibility. And they get heaps more expensive if you’ve gotta go around the corner. So you might, in your stairwell design, be thinking of a straight run of stairs. You also make the stairs a bit wider than a meter wide. You make them about 1.2 so that little stair can go up and down. We’ve put these into a house. The lady had a stroke. She was the fit one of the family, who knew? Anyway, so that becomes a plausible option for you. So think about that. The other option is you could go, what happens if we wanna put a lift in the building? We often put this into a future-proofing design for the house. Some of the tricks we use is we will do a U-shaped set of stairs. So you go up, around, and you come back into another room.
There’s often, with staircases, you create a bit more space. And then we design the middle of the U as a place where you can put a future lift so that if something terrible happened, you’re in rehab, you could just ring up the lift people and say, put the lift in the stairwell.
Installing Lifts in a Queenslander for Accessibility
It’s all sorted. And we design the floor at the bottom of the lift with a little recess in it so then we can put the pit of the lift into that little recess, and the bottom of the floor of the lift is flush with the floor downstairs. And then you can get up and come out however you like. They’re not as expensive as they used to be. The price is actually coming down because the market’s increasing. And now there’s these rules, so the manufacturers are really getting some nice lifts. And it’s really, yep, one thing in the building industry that’s actually getting cheaper. Incredible. Okay, so that’s lifts. Sometimes we do it so that there’s like a big storeroom down below, and there might be a big linen cupboard that you could connect up, and that becomes your lift shaft. So all of that is not that hard to do at the beginning, but to come in and retrofit it, it’s a pain in the neck. So just prepare in your future-proofing plan for accessibility.
So with accessibility, it’s all about the detail. It’s thinking through how you use a space or how you might use a space so you can be in that house long term. There’s a lot to think about, but it’s lasting value for your home, and it makes things so much easier in future. And if you have any questions, you can always get in touch with PlaceMate Architects, and we’ll see if we can help you out. Thank you.
