The Great Modular Wheelchair Ramp Saga

After sixteen months of bumping Alex up and down our front steps (while holding the storm door open) every time he needed to get to the school bus or our car, we finally installed a wheelchair ramp—yay!

I didn’t find much online when I went to research what it would take to get a wheelchair ramp on the front of our house, so forgive the detail of this rather long post—a lot of it is provided for others who might be looking for similar information and who might benefit from our experience.

I suppose there’s another reason for going into detail about what it took to get Alex his wheelchair ramp. What we’ve learned over the past eighteen months is that people with physical disabilities live in a parallel world—one in which everything is about ten times harder to accomplish than it would normally be.

Heck, getting a wheelchair ramp—just to be able to get in and out of the house safely—proved to be an epic saga, full of ups and downs. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

 

Two Challenges: Making a Plan and Finding Funding

We’d been considering this for a while, but as we’ve been triaging Alex’s many needs, it didn’t quite rise to the top of the priority list, especially considering the challenges involved. First, how would we squeeze a safe ramp into our cramped front yard? State building code requires a 20:1 slope (that’s 20 units of run for every one unit of rise), and accessibility experts warn that a ramp steeper than 12:1 could be dangerous. Our front door sits 28 inches off the ground; doing the math, that’s at least 28 feet of ramp, not including landings!

Our second concern was how to pay for it. At the time, we figured a ramp would cost about $3,000, not including labor. Neither we nor anyone we knew had that kind of money. So we sat on it.

Then, back in July, one of Alex’s PCAs took the initiative to get the ball rolling (she must have been getting tired of those steps, too) by contacting a carpenter she knew from church. He was the first of three friends-of-a-friend with some kind of construction/carpentry experience to come by and scope out our situation. One of them even came up with a rough sketch of how we might squeeze 28 feet of ramp into our front yard using a switchback system.

So, once we had a plan for our wheelchair ramp, we set to work finding funding. We started by checking into grants. The logical place to start asking was with Alex’s PCA agency, the Southeastern Minnesota Center for Independent Living, where we were told there really weren’t any grants out there. Surprise, surprise. (Leave a comment if you know of grants we missed!) We checked with our local Habitat for Humanity chapter; it turns out they will build a ramp at the cost of materials. That would be helpful, but still wouldn’t touch the $3,000 or so required for cement and treated lumber for a conventional wooden ramp.

Then we contacted our county social worker, who right away determined that Alex qualified for a “CADI waiver.” CADI stands for Community Alternatives for Disabled Individuals; it’s designed to help disabled people on Medical Assistance stay in their homes. (Three cheers for the generosity of Minnesota taxpayers! Although, it should be said, the program is designed to save the state money by avoiding more expensive institutionalization costs. You can check the details at the CADI waiver web page.) Within a week, we had the paperwork filled out and were ready to start finding contractors.

Finding a contractor and drafting a plan

Heh, heh. This turns out to be a lot more difficult than you might think. The local CADI waiver team at the county required at least two bids to ensure the cost-effectiveness of the project, and let me tell you, getting those two bids was like pulling hens’ teeth.

The main problem was that this was a small, short job—too small for most of our busy builders and contractors to even bother with. Long story short, it took nearly a month before we finally got bids from three contractors, two of whom were acquaintances who did so as a favor; the third was the friend of a friend who may have also submitted the bid as a favor.

Before we could get the bids, though, we needed to provide specifications—the builders needed the details of the project they were bidding on, right? In short, we needed a plan or a blueprint for the ramp.

Like a fool, I had thought the bidding contractors would come out and make measurements and consult building codes and draw up plans. That isn’t what happened. Over the course of the month we spent trying to get bids, it slowly dawned on me that I was going to have to provide the detailed plans because, once again, the job was too small (see above) to warrant the work of drawing up plans—and there’s even less incentive when you’re bidding on a project that you might not win.

Now, I am not an architect or even versed in something as basic as Google’s SketchUp, which is really what you’d want to use to do it right, but I took a photo of the building site from above (by crawling onto the roof) and then slapped that into Microsoft Publisher and kind of roughed out plans that way. Along the way I consulted our local building inspector, e-mailing him two different versions of the plan and talking to him on the phone no less than three times in some detail.

You might think, “It’s a darned ramp, what’s the big deal?” And in reply I would forward you to The Ramp Project, and more specifically to their 64-page manual, “How to Build a Wheelchair Ramp for Home Accessibility.” (The Ramp Project website, which usually lives at wheelchairramp.org, was down at the time of this writing.) It turns out that there are multiple considerations to take into account when building a safe, functional ramp.

The most important consideration is slope; a gentler slope makes for a safer, more accessible ramp. As I explained above, though, a gentler slope requires a longer run, which in our case necessitated a switchback design with a landing halfway down. Even with a switchback design, though, the ramp layout had to allow for sufficient setback from the property line and the public sidewalk as required by state building code.

Fortunately, we have a sane building inspector here, and he gave us the okay for a slope that was less than the 20:1 required by state code (which the code allows him to do for private residences), and he also gave us a pass on the setback from the public sidewalk.

Another consideration I hadn’t thought of before the building inspector pointed it out was that you need a flat landing at the top for the wheelchair to rest while the door is being opened. Duh, right? But that meant adding a landing to the top of the ramp—over our existing stairs, which was another complication to figure out. (We opted to make it flush with the top step.)

When all was said and done, we ended up with plans for a wheelchair ramp that required:

• a top landing (5 x 8 feet)
• a 16-foot section of ramp
• a turn-around landing at the switchback (5 x 8 feet)
• a 14-foot section of ramp
• a concrete pad to get the wheelchair from the end of the ramp to the public sidewalk
• stairs off the top landing so able-bodied people wouldn’t have to traverse the entire ramp to get to the front door

Once we had the plans in place, we had to decide whether to build a ramp from treated wood decking (the most traditional route) or purchase a modular wheelchair ramp (made of aluminum).

Our building inspector, strangely enough, suggested plywood over treated decking. But as The Ramp Project (and a couple of our builders) point out, plywood makes for lousy ramps. Cheap, but not safe or durable. It gets slick when it’s wet, and the layers separate under exposure to the elements.

After considering the costs and benefits of each option, we decided to order a modular ramp.

Why we chose a modular wheelchair ramp

Like the name implies, modular ramps come in sections; they’re lightweight, and relatively easy to assemble and disassemble. (The key word here being “relatively.”) That meant lower labor costs. More importantly, the relative “portability” of the ramp means that if we decide to move, it can move with us—we don’t need to build another ramp from scratch. (Theoretically you could also disassemble and reassemble a wood ramp, but the cost would be prohibitive.) Plus, if we ever find ourselves in a position where we’re no longer using it, the ramp can be disassembled and donated back to the county or to someone else who might need it.

Had a wood ramp cost less than a modular one, our decision might have gone the other way, but in our case, the costs were relatively similar. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the labor and materials costs for a wooden vs. aluminum modular wheelchair ramp. These numbers are taken from the winning bid for our particular ramp plans; the cost of the modular ramp is what we actually ended up paying:

	Wood ramp (using treated deck lumber)	Aluminum modular ramp
Materials	$3,885	$3,689
Labor	88 hours | $4,225	38 hours | $1,850

Two big caveats about these numbers.

First, the labor costs in this case included the cost of pouring cement for the bottom landing and building new wood steps on the front of the house to replace the ones covered by the top ramp landing. Labor costs for a less complicated design would be significantly less; we estimate it took about a day—maybe eight to ten hours—for our contractor (him and a helper) to actually assemble the modular ramp.

Second, we discovered that the cost of modular wheelchair ramps vary widely.

Choosing a modular wheelchair ramp

There are a few different types of modular ramps available: PATHWAY and Titan are made by EZ Access, while the Modular XP is made by Prairie View Industries. Both are sold by local dealers, as well as by several online vendors.

We compared prices for the two systems at DiscountRamps.com and eMedRamps.com. At the time of this writing, DiscountRamps.com was listing the cost of an 8-foot section of the EZ Access ramp at $743 (without handrails or supports), while an 8-foot section of the PVI ramp was quoted at $600 (with handrails and supports). At eMedRamps.com, the price of an 8-foot section of the EZ Access ramp was $739 (with handrails), while the cost of an 8-foot section of the PVI ramp was $600.

Both manufacturers will send you a list of local dealers on request. There’s a big advantage to going with a local dealer in that typically they will come out to your site and draw up plans for you and then help you order the right parts. The downside, of course, lies in the price tag.

We contacted Prairie View Industries for a list of our local vendors, one of which turned out to be a chain hardware store with a location in our town. When we contacted the store, though, they seemed totally unfamiliar with the product (we had to tell the manager that they were listed by the manufacturer as a dealer), and they had to contact their corporate office for a price quote. The price they came back with for our 28 feet of ramp, plus two landings? $8,100. And that didn’t include on-site consultation or delivery to the building site.

By contrast, eMedRamps.com shipped the same ramp to our builder for $3,689. (They were running a sale at the time, plus the cost per foot goes down as the length of the ramp increases.)

As for the local vendor, I actually followed up with them twice to make sure their quote was accurate; apparently it was. I won’t mention what I think of a company that feels it needs to charge a $4,000 markup for what amounts to ordering a product they don’t have in their inventory and having it delivered to their store.

We thought twice about going with the cheap option (would the quality or service be inferior?). We were a little nervous about getting the order right, but I called customer service at eMedRamps.com and they were good about answering all my questions. When the shipment came (a little more than a week after placing the order), it turned out we were missing some top railing pieces, and they offered to ship the missing pieces overnight. (The builder sensibly declined, since it would have cost eMedRamps.com hundreds to do so; we got it a few days later anyway.)

Installing the ramp

It took our builder about 36 hours to complete the entire project; much of that time involved pouring the new sidewalk and building wooden steps on the front of the top landing, plus putting in wood rails and a small wood platform next to the top landing where there was a gap between the landing and the house.

It looked like it took our builders about 8-10 hours to actually assemble the ramp; much of that time was taken up with leveling the ground and adjusting the legs so the slope would be right. Both manufacturers tout quick setup times, as do some local vendors (30 minutes, claims one!), and that might be the case for experienced professionals who are setting up the same system over and over again. Each of the three guys who bid on our project was extremely skeptical of those claims. If you’re setting up a modular ramp for the first time, keep in mind that it will take some time to familiarize yourself with the instructions and how everything goes together.

You can get a sense for how these ramps assemble by watching each company’s assembly video:




By October 31, the ramp was up and the concrete had been freshly poured (leading to worries about trick-or-treaters stepping in before it set up, which didn’t happen), and a few days later, Alex (and his siblings) were happily zooming up and down the new ramp.

At about 13:1, the slope is still a little too steep for him to power up himself, but as he gains strength, it should become more manageable.

And that is the conclusion of our Great Ramp Saga, which I hope we never have to go through again (I am already dreading how we’re going to disassemble it when we move someday). Many thanks to the Great Ramp Saga support group—Jim, Barbara, Laurie, our therapists (just kidding), and everyone who listened to me whine and complain about this ordeal.

If you have additional or different information on installing a wheelchair ramp at home, leave a comment below and you, too, can become part of someone’s Ramp Saga support group.

(P.S. ... our next ramp saga, getting over the bumpy thresholds at the entrances, should be much simpler thanks to this threshold ramp.