Aging in place in Sarasota

We match across Sarasota and the surrounding Sarasota and Manatee county 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 Sarasota

Sarasota is one of the communities on this list with its own building department, so a curbless shower conversion, a widened bathroom doorway or a ramp at a City of Sarasota address is permitted by the city rather than by Sarasota County - and that city file is the record an insurer or a future buyer will ask for. Water, wastewater and reclaimed water come from the City of Sarasota Utilities, a department of the same city government, so the utility account and the permit counter belong to one authority. A street or two east of the city line the answer changes: those addresses are unincorporated, permitted by Sarasota County and served by Sarasota County Public Utilities. The houses the city covers are the reason the work here is specific. Most of the in-town stock went up between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s - single storey on a slab, concrete block and stucco, two or three bedrooms - and the bathroom is typically a five-by-eight hall bath with a tub behind a door that measures 28 to 30 inches. That door is the deciding measurement, because a walker or a wheelchair needs the doorway before it needs the shower, and because the wall is block, widening it is a framing and finishing job rather than a trimming job. Where the house sits in a condominium or a deed-restricted street, the association's architectural review runs alongside the city permit and usually sets the timeline rather than the contractor's calendar.

Municipal reference: City of Sarasota Utilities

Getting an accessibility contractor out to Sarasota

Sarasota is the base of the map. US-41, Tamiami Trail, runs the length of the city north to south, close to the bay, and the interstate is the other spine: I-75 sits a few miles east with the interchanges that bring crews in at University Parkway at the north end, then Fruitville Road, Bee Ridge Road and Clark Road further south. Between the two, the names that come up on almost every job are Fruitville Road and Bee Ridge Road crossing the city east to west, Clark Road at the south end, University Parkway forming the northern edge toward the airport and Lakewood Ranch, and Siesta Drive carrying traffic west over the north bridge to Siesta Key. The city's in-town streets are the practical constraint rather than the drive: they are narrow, often tree-canopied, and frequently without a driveway long enough for a material drop and a dumpster at the same time. The other constraint is the season. From January through April, US-41, the downtown blocks and the roads toward Siesta Key and the beaches carry traffic that adds real time to any appointment, so a quote visit and a work day are both better scheduled around it. Hurricane season adds the other half of the picture: this is a storm-surge county, the evacuation zones run from the barrier islands inland, and homeowners here think about impact glass, shutters and a generator at the same time as they think about the bathroom.

What Sarasota's housing stock means for aging in place

Sarasota carries two very different houses for accessibility. The in-town grid - the neighbourhoods around downtown such as Laurel Park and Gillespie Park, the streets east of US-41, and the bayfront ones toward Indian Beach and Sapphire Shores - is largely mid-century to 1980s single storey on a slab: two or three bedrooms, one or two bathrooms, a tub-and-shower combination in a small hall bath, and a doorway of 28 to 30 inches to get into it. Interior floors are usually tile or, in the earlier houses, terrazzo, both of which are hard and genuinely slippery once they are wet, and both of which make a curbless conversion straightforward once the tub is out. The floor plan almost always has a step somewhere the homeowner stops noticing: down to the screened lanai, up from the garage, or a threshold at the front door. The newer and rebuilt houses carry wider doors, usually 36 inches, and impact glass, which changes the price of the work because the doorway may not need touching at all. Whether the slab can be recessed for a true curbless base depends on the structure, and on a block-and-slab house that is a question for the contractor and the engineer, not for a website.

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Sources

Aging in Place tools & calculators

Aging in Place resources