Making life easier: Project Manager Alistair Morrison and CLRS chief executive officer Leah Taaffe have been working on the Opening Doors housing project. Photo: Aidan Briggs
Photo by
Aidan Briggs
Echuca-Moama’s Community Living and Respite Services is getting ready to open its fifth Opening Doors house in the region.
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The Opening Doors project builds affordable housing that is able accommodate people living with a disability.
“The Opening Doors project is this kind of distinct project started because we realised that there was a real need for homes to be built that thought about what does a person with disability need and how do we do it?,” chief executive officer Leah Taaffe said.
Accessible: The most recent Opening Doors housing project will be the fifth in the region. Photo: Aidan Briggs
Photo by
Aidan Briggs
“As part of the NDIS rollout, there was lots of discussion around that and we got a grant from the government to go towards building a house.
“These projects are about providing safe, secure, ongoing times for people who otherwise wouldn’t have that opportunity.”
The current housing being completed in Moama will be home for two people, who were each facing homelessness without this sort of help.
“This project will provide a home for two people who otherwise wouldn’t have a home. They are both actually essentially homeless at the moment, living in temporary housing, one who aged out of the child protection system didn’t have a home,” she said.
“So they are people with a disability who experience the same challenges as the rest of us in the housing market.”
Toned down: The house uses muted colours to help relieve the simulation levels of residents. Photo: Aidan Briggs
Photo by
Aidan Briggs
Alistair Morrison has been the project manager for the property and he said it had been a very rewarding exercise.
“There are things which I would do in an ordinary house now to make them more acceptable at very little cost. For instance, making the doors a little bit wider so you can get through with a wheelchair in most instances isn’t that much more difficult or that much more expensive,” he said.
“I guess it made me very conscious. I was always conscious of people with disabilities, but it’s made me more aware of the problems that people with a disability may have.”
Easy access: The doors in the house have been made wider to accommodate wheelchair access. Photo: Aidan Briggs
Photo by
Aidan Briggs
The houses include slight but important modifications made so that they can be liveable for people with a disability. This has included the overall layout, the height of benches and the width of door openings.
“It’s the little things like light switches at the right level and the switches can’t be across the other side of the benches so that they can be easily accessible,” Mr Morrison said.
“The doors are wider than normal in the house so that they’re all accessible for wheelchairs. It’s just those little things that I’ve had to think about ahead of time.”
Ms Taaffe said it was finding houses with those sorts of modifications that made finding a house difficult when you were living with a disability.
“It’s really challenging because if you need a home that has wider doors or zero steps, they just don’t exist,” she said.
“So trying to find a home where you can do all the things that you need to do so you feel safe and secure in, that’s really difficult.
“It’s also really expensive. So if you only have the disability support pension to pay your rent, a lot of rents are unaffordable.”
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