Shelby's accessible home
Donation protected
Dear Family and Friends,
2018 is shaping up to be a big year for the Feeneys; we are going to do three things to improve the quality of life for our family and Shelby.
1. We need to modify our home to make it handicap accessible for Shelby.
2. We need to travel to the CHARGE Clinic at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital to see a team of doctors that understands how CHARGE Syndrome impacts Shelby’s health and development.
3. We need to buy a van that can accommodate Shelby.
Yeah that’s a big load of craziness to add to our life and we are reaching out to our family and friends to help us make these three things a reality.
Each of these needs are big and we’d like to tell you a little bit about our home modification project.
Shelby is doing so many amazing things, she is growing bigger and stronger, she is communicating better and becoming more physically active too. We are so happy to see her grow into the happy four year old she is. With her great gains come new challenges, for example, it is becoming unsafe to lift her up and down stairs. We have known for a while that our house as it is now won’t be suitable for our family and we have finally decided to make the changes it needs.
We want a home our whole family can enjoy for the rest of our lives, a place that is safe for Shelby and us as we care for her needs, a place Shelby can be independent and move around using her walker, a place where Shelby can do things four year olds do like wash her hands at a sink that accommodates her, a place that she can grow into so she can slam a door in our face when she is a teenager.
We are excited to have a home we can continue to enjoy together and where Shelby can live comfortably, safely, and independently. Here are some of our plans for our new two story addition: a wheelchair ramp, wider doorways throughout the house, a first floorplan with an open kitchen, dining, and living room area, and a handicapped accessible half bath with space to care for Shelby’s bathroom needs. We will add a second staircase with chair lift so we can safely move Shelby up and down stairs. On the second floor Shelby will have a larger bedroom and storage space for her medical supplies and adaptive equipment, a handicapped accessible bathroom with walk/roll in shower, tub, and toilet.
We are looking forward to collaborating with Beige and Bleu Design studio to help us complete our renovation and design plans for our new forever home.
If we need to keep costs down we plan to do some of the work ourselves, ask our friends in the Trades to help, and reach out to local business for donations for things such as kitchen cabinets.
We are asking our families and friends for several things: money to help finance these needs, using skills you may have to make the building project go smoothly, sharing our need with others, and prayer. Prayer really is the most important piece to this; our family has lived a stress-filled and complicated life for the last four years and the thought of undertaking a construction project and traveling with Shelby is overwhelming but we remember how prayer and God’s provision has brought us through other things and we trust he will do it again.
We expect the new addition to be about $100,000 plus, the handicap accessible van to be about $40,000, and we do not have a ballpark figure for the trip to Cincinnati because insurance may not cover it.
Thanks for loving our family.
Dan, Nicole, Elyse, Tamsin, and Shelby
2018 is shaping up to be a big year for the Feeneys; we are going to do three things to improve the quality of life for our family and Shelby.
1. We need to modify our home to make it handicap accessible for Shelby.
2. We need to travel to the CHARGE Clinic at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital to see a team of doctors that understands how CHARGE Syndrome impacts Shelby’s health and development.
3. We need to buy a van that can accommodate Shelby.
Yeah that’s a big load of craziness to add to our life and we are reaching out to our family and friends to help us make these three things a reality.
Each of these needs are big and we’d like to tell you a little bit about our home modification project.
Shelby is doing so many amazing things, she is growing bigger and stronger, she is communicating better and becoming more physically active too. We are so happy to see her grow into the happy four year old she is. With her great gains come new challenges, for example, it is becoming unsafe to lift her up and down stairs. We have known for a while that our house as it is now won’t be suitable for our family and we have finally decided to make the changes it needs.
We want a home our whole family can enjoy for the rest of our lives, a place that is safe for Shelby and us as we care for her needs, a place Shelby can be independent and move around using her walker, a place where Shelby can do things four year olds do like wash her hands at a sink that accommodates her, a place that she can grow into so she can slam a door in our face when she is a teenager.
We are excited to have a home we can continue to enjoy together and where Shelby can live comfortably, safely, and independently. Here are some of our plans for our new two story addition: a wheelchair ramp, wider doorways throughout the house, a first floorplan with an open kitchen, dining, and living room area, and a handicapped accessible half bath with space to care for Shelby’s bathroom needs. We will add a second staircase with chair lift so we can safely move Shelby up and down stairs. On the second floor Shelby will have a larger bedroom and storage space for her medical supplies and adaptive equipment, a handicapped accessible bathroom with walk/roll in shower, tub, and toilet.
We are looking forward to collaborating with Beige and Bleu Design studio to help us complete our renovation and design plans for our new forever home.
If we need to keep costs down we plan to do some of the work ourselves, ask our friends in the Trades to help, and reach out to local business for donations for things such as kitchen cabinets.
We are asking our families and friends for several things: money to help finance these needs, using skills you may have to make the building project go smoothly, sharing our need with others, and prayer. Prayer really is the most important piece to this; our family has lived a stress-filled and complicated life for the last four years and the thought of undertaking a construction project and traveling with Shelby is overwhelming but we remember how prayer and God’s provision has brought us through other things and we trust he will do it again.
We expect the new addition to be about $100,000 plus, the handicap accessible van to be about $40,000, and we do not have a ballpark figure for the trip to Cincinnati because insurance may not cover it.
Thanks for loving our family.
Dan, Nicole, Elyse, Tamsin, and Shelby
Organizer
Nicole Feeney
Organizer
Whitman, MA
