Mom is getting on in years and the time has come to start talking about her living arrangements.
She has been on her own for the past eight years since Dad died and it is becoming more difficult for her to carry out daily tasks on her own.
My husband and I are the logical choice to take her in but our home will need some renovations in order to do this. We want her to still have her independence as much as she can so we are having contractors make some changes to the den area of the house. They are installing a new entryway so that mom can come and go on her own but it will have an alarm installed so we know when this happens. This way if she decides to go somewhere in the middle of the night we can stop her before she gets too far. One of the issues she has, living on her own, is her constant need to adjust the HVAC system. We will stop by her current home and find it way too warm or too cold and we worry that this is not healthy. We are going to have a thermostat put all the wall in her new space but it won’t actually be hooked into the HVAC system. The temperature in her space will be controlled by the main house system so it will remain constant no matter what she does. She will still feel in control but have a comfortable temperature year round too. We don’t think she will ever notice but if she does we will simply tell her that we will look into the problem.