Aging in place in Bearden

We match across Knoxville and the surrounding East Tennessee communities, so the contractor you are introduced to is one whose crews actually work your part of the county.

Permits, utilities and local rules for Aging in Place work in Bearden

Bearden is mostly inside the City of Knoxville, so the building permit for a bathroom conversion, a widened doorway or an exterior ramp comes from the city's Plans Review and Inspections office rather than from Knox County, and water, wastewater and electricity come from the Knoxville Utilities Board. The parts of the neighbourhood that fall outside the city line cross over to the county's Codes Administration, which is why the address decides the paperwork rather than the neighbourhood name. Almost every condominium or townhouse address here also has a second set of rules behind the permit, because the housing includes a real band of attached and multi-unit buildings, and the association's architectural review governs what happens inside a unit and how a crew uses the common areas. The stock splits by street: the post-war streets behind Kingston Pike carry 1940s to 1960s one-level ranches and small two-bedroom houses with a hall bath at five by eight and a tub combination behind a 28 to 30 inch door, while the newer houses and the attached units were built with 30 to 36 inch openings and a separate shower. For an accessibility project the split decides everything: in a house the work is often the doorway and the tub; in an attached unit it is the shower floor, the blocking behind a tiled wall and the shared-entry rules of the building.

Municipal reference: Knoxville Utilities Board (KUB)

Getting an accessibility contractor out to Bearden

Bearden is reached on Kingston Pike, US-11 and US-70, which runs east to west through the whole neighbourhood and is its commercial spine, and by Northshore Drive, which runs south-west along the lake, and Papermill Drive and Weisgarber Road, which carry the north-south traffic toward Middlebrook Pike and the interstate. Bearden Hill is the local landmark, and the interchange at I-40 and I-75 with Papermill Drive and Cedar Bluff is the way in from the interstate. Third Creek runs through the neighbourhood and the land falls toward Fort Loudoun Lake and the Tennessee River on the south side, so the streets off Northshore Drive step down rather than run flat - a driveway that pitches, a walk that climbs to the door, and a back garden that drops away. The other local fact is traffic: Kingston Pike through Bearden carries the heaviest commercial traffic in West Knoxville through the day, so a quote visit and a work day are both better scheduled around it, and the older streets behind the pike are narrow enough that parking a work truck, a delivery and a dumpster at one address takes planning.

What Bearden's housing stock means for aging in place

Bearden is two housing stocks in one neighbourhood. The post-war streets are single-level ranches and small houses on crawlspaces or slabs: three bedrooms, one bath or one and a half, a hall bath with a tub-and-shower combination behind a 28 to 30 inch door, and hardwood floors that have been under the same furniture for fifty years. Those are the houses where the doorway and the tub are both problems at once, and where the plumbing is usually original. The newer and attached stock - the townhouses and condominium buildings along the lake and off the pike - was built with 30 to 36 inch interior doors and a separate shower in the larger plans, and in the multi-storey buildings an entry stair or an elevator between the unit and the street. The most common findings either way are a slick hard floor, missing or absent grab-bar blocking behind the tile, and a threshold at the exterior door that has been stepped over for years without being noticed. A recessed curbless floor is a structural question in a slab building rather than a fixed option.

What accessibility work does a Bearden home need most?

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Sources

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Aging in Place resources