“Beam me up Scotty.”
byWyn Evans
Great excitement chez nous! We’ve been in our current house for six years now. We moved in the autumn that The Girl joined Cardiff High School (CHS), in year 7. Our then home, on Ty Draw Road, overlooking the Rec, would soon prove too difficult for us to maintain. I had not long before been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and keeping on top of three floors, all the cleaning and maintenance and gardening was starting to feel quite daunting. Plus, there was the great exodus from Penylan to consider. The Council had published new guidelines for its CHS catchment policy. Not a week went by, it seemed, without one family, then another, upping sticks and moving closer to CHS. Because The Girl (our daughter who has Down Syndrome) had a Statement of special educational needs and because it was determined that CHS would best meet those needs, we knew she had a place guaranteed. However, we thought it best to move closer to the high school to minimise the distance she’d need to walk. Thus it was in that Year 7 Summer that we sold Ty Draw Road. Not all of it, of course, just the bit we held the freehold to, number 40. We had nowhere to move to at that point and instead went AirBnB in Llandaff staying there for the summer months while searching for a place of our own. Eventually, we found our current home on Rhydypenau Road, which links the Cyncoed and Rhydypenau roundabouts. A mad rush ensued and by the start of term, we’d moved in. The one thing that niggled though was that we’d had no time or opportunity to do those minor building works that would make the new house our home; install a new bathroom, lay a new lawn, and set down new raised vegetable beds; arrange for bookshelves to be fitted, reinsulate the loft, and address the problem of the hall, stairs and landing. The HSL we inherited had very little space between the opened front door and the first stair. 6 cardiff-times.co.uk
Also the existing stairwell seemed very narrow and turned sharply ninety degrees left a metre from the top. As we discovered, the effect of this was that one of our existing wardrobes would have to be sold simply because we couldn’t get it upstairs. Worse was to come. Because my wife, The Boss, has Multiple Sclerosis it was necessary to have installed a Stannah stairlift, which used up even more of the space available. We managed to get it fitted more or less concurrently with our moving in but we had no opportunity to address the more pressing issue that was the overall poor design and lack of space in both the top and bottom parts of the HSL. Here we now are, six, nearly seven years on and at long last we have determined on a suitable course of action. And, as I said, we are greatly excited! We have taken architectural advice and come to the reluctant conclusion that the stairs cannot be moved backwards a couple of feet; the stairs themselves would become too steep. But what can be done, relatively painlessly, is to rip out and sell the existing stairlift thus clearing a couple of square yards of floorspace which is currently dead space squatted-on by the stairlift. And, of course, the width of the stairs themselves is essentially broader because, with no stairlift, there is no need to have a tubular rail or track for it to run on. Now the quick-thinkers amongst you will already be asking how we intend to get up and down the stairs without the trusty Stannah. After all, multiple sclerosis isn’t going to go away. Neither is my Parkinson’s for that matter. This is what we are excited about. We are doing away with a stairlift and putting in a ‘Stilts-lift’ instead. Siting it in our utility room (off the living room) the lift will rise and fall vertically through the ceiling decanting in our main bedroom. It will be a oneperson lift. There will be no visible hoists or noisy motors. It runs using discreet wire rope hoists and built-in drive equipment which is all neatly
