Posted on 02/10/2002 6:39:53 AM PST by Skooz
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:32:30 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The worry is sincere, but the step is far to big of a stretch. They went through this stuff with Churches years ago and it got put down. It is true that is may affect you selling price, but most houses today are essentially sold 'as is,' even by the builders. To pass such legistation would be to severely risk armed rebellion, so I don't even consider it a remote chance. That doesn't mean someone might not propose it, but you will never see it on that basis.
I mean, after all, if you are selling a house that cannot be immediately occupied by a handi...oops! disabled person then you are effectively practicing descrimination.
The person buying it will just have to deal with it just as they do now with such things as swimming pools etc. The bottom line is that if the whole system does it, the actual cost fades into very minor amounts, and then when granny gets old and you decide to care for her last month of two at home instead of getting squeezed dry of your inheritance faster than grasshoppers in Nevada can clean a wheatfield, you will have the house already prepped so the social workers and Old folks home types can't run you ragged.
If you want to see grown folks cry, ask them about how a parent's $600,000 dollar estate can evaporate far far quicker than their kids can ever grow up. Preparing your home for wheel chair access as well as a railed bathroom might even be a windfall for yourself someday if you ever, God forbid, get hit by a semi on the way home from work. It ain't a bad idea at all, truly.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing about the state I used to live in, Western Washington has gone completely 'round the bend.
For a small contractor to supply himself with a legitmate average income, pay business overheads on top and have a staff of two or three, he must see a gross income of about 1500 a day. You can always find someone to do it on the cheap, but he won't have the insurance, the overhead, the employees and the equipment.
Adding on is always a form of custom work, often with many small and seemingly minor details that legitimately take time and money. Even if the passed such a regulation, there is no way it could ever be made to stick, and the great majority of those getting squeezed would be on the lower end of the economic model. It would never stick even if it happened. There would probably be riots. It is true that some dummies would push it, but it's just not in the cards. In the meantime, I can think of a hald dozen times over the years I had to temporily remove doors to get something into my house, and I expect someday there is a good likelihood I will need wheel chair access either for myself of someone in the family. As part of the design parameters for building new, the alterations will cost next to nothing. Contractors are usully so penny pinched they will cheat everything to death, but the idea of few heavier studs in the bathroom wall is just simply as pie and only adds a few dollars onto the cost of a house. Wider doors cost a bit more, but if they were the standard size they would be the cheapest made because of the volume of them made. Level walkways are solved in the grading and design. It is virtually impossible to say they cost more except perhaps unless your house is built on a butte. All in all, the worst thing the regs do is limit the opportunity for small contractors to charge you a lot to make up some small deficiency in the orginal plan. You can live without that.
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