Pauline's voice - Good homes for all

This has been my home for 54 years. I raised my family here and it has many memories, but I’m ready to leave. I’d really like to see another young family move in and make it their own – quite apart from the trouble I’m having living independently here, it’s far too big for just me. And it’s just the wrong kind of house for a disabled person.

There are steps at the front and back doors, a huge garden than I can’t look after, and I haven’t been able to get upstairs for many months now. I have just the living room and the kitchen. There is a downstairs toilet, but I can’t get into it with my wheelchair. So the living room also has to be both my bedroom and my toilet – I have a commode in the corner.

And in the kitchen, everything is difficult. Among the dangers identified when I was assessed was that I wouldn’t be able to get out of the house on my own if there was a fire. I like to be as independent as possible, and I like to cook my own Sunday breakfast and dinner, but I know it’s a bit risky, and that I do have to accept some help.

It’s the little things that I’ve taken for granted over the years I’ve lived here that make independent life almost impossible. The cooker hob is at the wrong height for me now. I can’t get alongside the oven in my wheelchair when the door is open, and I can’t reach the counter tops properly or use them safely. Worst of all is that I can’t reach under the kitchen tap to rinse my hands and it’s the only sink on the ground floor. So I need help from carers to keep clean and have to make do with alcohol gel when they aren’t there if I need to clean my hands.

This house would need no end of changes to make it suitable for me, and that would be pointless when I don’t need all this space and it’s perfect as it is for a family. I am now a prisoner in my own home and quite desperate to be as independent as possible, and I’m sure housing staff feel just as frustrated. They are trying hard to find me a place – I’ve had three offers but each one was wrong for a wheelchair user with my level of disability. The problem seems to be a general shortage of homes that make independent living possible for disabled people.