Bathroom safety in the DC area, from grab bar installation to a curbless shower

Let us put the grab bars in before you decide anything about the shower. It's a small job, and you get to watch how our crew works in your parent's home before you trust us with a bigger one.

Most people want to start in this room anyway. In AARP's 2024 Home and Community Preferences Survey, adults 50 and older who were thinking about changes to their homes put bathroom safety features at the top of the list, at 74 percent. Once the bars are up, a shower conversion stays on the plan only if stepping over the tub wall is still the danger.

The bathroom packs every hazard into one small room. Bars go where a person sits, stands or steps over, at the toilet, inside the shower and at the tub edge. Every one is fixed into the wall structure, never held by suction, because it has to carry a full body weight in a slip.

Grab bar installation for seniors starts with the person who will hold the bar. We watch how your parent gets into the shower and up off the toilet, then put each bar where that hand reaches. When there's no stud in that spot, blocking goes in behind the wall first, so the bar still lands on solid wood.

A handheld shower on a slide bar and a seat or transfer bench let someone wash sitting down. A non-slip floor goes where wet feet land, and an anti-scald valve caps the water temperature for someone with slow reactions or numb feet.

When stepping over the tub wall is itself the danger, rails only do so much. A curbless shower replaces the tub with a floor you walk straight onto, and it works with a walker, a shower chair or a wheelchair. For someone who won't give up baths, a walk-in tub has a door in its side.

A comfort-height toilet sits a few inches higher than a standard one, which takes real strain off the knees and hips on the way down and back up. With a grab bar beside it, getting off the toilet stops being the hardest part of the morning.

The assessment shows how the person uses the room and what the rest of the house needs. Then you get a written scope and a fixed price, and the scope says how long the shower will be out of use. Our own crews do the plumbing, the tile and the bars, and nothing gets billed beyond that price unless you approve a change.

Grab bars are the smallest job in the house, and a full shower conversion is one of the largest. Plenty of bathrooms get much safer from the first round alone.

Bath work comes first for most families, because the bathroom is where a fall is most likely to turn into a hip fracture. It matters most for someone who bathes alone, for a spouse who helps the other in and out of the tub, and for a patient who can't come home to that bathroom as it stands.

In a rental, bars and rails go in with the landlord's written permission, and we write that request for you.