If you worry that disability or age will push a senior out of a home, a good home remodeling could keep that from happening. In fact, it’s possible to add in stylish and fashionable changes that also modify the home to make it easier for seniors to live in.

To get started, you just need a vision. Here are a few tips for creating the ultimate vision board to create stylish and functional modifications to create the perfect home for senior citizens.

What is a vision board?

A vision board is a place to center your ideas. Without it, ideas simply swirl around in your head, and it’s easy to forget one when another occurs to you. The board is a place to jot ideas and hold swatches of fabric, pictures of furniture, and color patches that you can move around.

The first step in getting the perfect vision board is getting a feel for what kind of environment you want. When you’re decorating for senior citizens, you need a perfect balance of three things: comfort, beauty, and safety.

Comfort: Consider your senior’s physical needs. The same furniture that might be comfortable and serviceable for a younger person might be much harder for an older person to sit comfortably in for more than a few minutes. Choose ergonomic furniture with plenty of support.

Beauty: You want to strike a balance between up-to-date fashion and your senior’s own personal aesthetic sense. These two don’t always match, but one way to reach a compromise is to ask for colors and materials that make your senior feel comfortable and happy. Use these as the basis of your decoration, giving them a modern twist that reflects today’s styling.

Safety: Safety is a key issue when it comes to home modifications for elderly and disabled people. The key is to embrace the safety issues and build around them rather than throwing them in as last-minute changes. 

Rather than fretting about how to make sure someone with a walker or wheelchair can get through the doorway, consider getting rid of the doorway entirely and opening up the space to create a vaulted look. Instead of fixating on the loss of a bathtub, think instead about how to make a walk-in shower the most inviting place in your whole home.

Build your board

Your next step is to build the actual vision board itself. This can be done in any way that makes sense to you. The key is that you can manipulate the items on the board as you need. Your board can be as simple as poster board with adhesive putty or as complicated as an online, computer-designed vision board.

If you do things online, pay attention to storage space: as you get into the details, it’s easy to accumulate so many pictures that you run out of space for all of them. Make use of the storage capacity of ibi or similar photo storage gadgets so you can keep all your snaps in one place.

Develop your creativity

The final tip for building the ultimate vision board is to spend plenty of time playing with it and looking at ideas that activate your own creative spark. 

You best understand the realities of your space and what you have to work with. You know what you want and what will make your senior happy. Take those ideas and let them sit. Manipulate the items on your board. You’ll be surprised at how your ideas change and grow as you visualize new decorative uses for space.