Have you ever found your doorway is to narrow and your chair does not fit through the door?
It is often the most over looked item when considering the purchase of a wheelchair, shower chair, floor lift, or other medical equipment, the width of the doorway. What is the overall width of the wheelchair or commode chair as compared to all of the doorways it has to go through?
The problem is we tend to measure the space between the door frames and not realize that the butt of the door sticks out into the open of the door and keeps the chair from clearing the doorway. Then we find that the chair or the floor lift does not fit through the doorway.
When this happens you can always remove the door, but then you have no privacy or odor control, if you get my drift. If you have room you could tear the old door out and install a wider door, but this can be costly and time consuming, not to mention messy.
A possible fix is to replace the door hinges with Expandable Door Hinges or I have seen them called Offset Hinges. This type of door hinge moves the door in line with the door frame generally adding up to an inch to the opening.
Expandable Door Hinge
These hinges also help if the door is wide enough for your chair but the footrest keep scraping the bottom of the door. We have these in our home to help reduce the number of times the door gets scraped up. I look at it as how much time they buy me between paint jobs and doors are the worst for me to have to repaint.
