By Katherine Salant
"This Old House," television's longest-running home improvement show, devoted the first half of its 25th season to documenting the transformation of Janet and Jeff Bernards' barn into a small cottage for Janet's 72-year-old parents, Jacqueline and Len Buckley. The 110-year-old barn sits behind the Bernards' house in Concord, Mass. I spent a day at the job site watching the taping of the eighth episode, which covered the installation of several windows and a synthetic exterior trim material, a discussion of interior and exterior lighting and a lesson in how to mix concrete. Subsequent episodes will cover other home-building related topics, including how to build a kitchen, the installation of a state of the art high-efficiency boiler system that will heat the cottage and an unusual driveway material.
But "This Old House" will not be addressing the biggest question, especially for those members of the audience with parents close in age to Janet Bernard's. Is it possible to live harmoniously with your parents at such close quarters?
The odds are good with a set-up like the Bernards'. In their case, the parents will be living in close proximity to Janet's family, but they are still leading very autonomous lives. The nature of the relationship is more like that of very close neighbors, not dependent parents and adult, care-giving children, albeit the parents will live in smaller quarters than they once enjoyed, and ones designed with an eye to potential physical infirmity.
Such a familial arrangement is unusual and requires careful planning to make it workable, several geriatric social workers said in recent interviews. The place to start: an honest assessment of your relationship with your parents.
How well do you get along? Do you know where the minefields are and how to avoid them? Are both sides capable of forgiving past transgressions and cutting each other some slack in the present and the future? Mulling this over can take awhile. The Bernards thought that having Janet's parents nearby was a great idea from the start, but they revisited it for a year before moving ahead with the project.
There are practical considerations to ponder. What are the expectations on both sides for interaction between the households? With Jeff and Holly Mitchell, who share a duplex with Holly's 70-something mother Mary Kudarauskas in Cambridge, another Boston suburb, the line is firmly drawn and privacy respected. Each household calls before visiting the other one. They nixed regularly scheduled activities, but they share meals frequently, and the proximity allows for plenty of informal contacts.
Design choices can reinforce the psychological boundaries. With the Bernards and Buckleys, 40 feet will separate the two domiciles, and each household will have a private outdoor space in the backyard that is out of view of the other one. For the Mitchells and Kudarauskas, the front doors are on opposite sides of their duplex.
Another important practical consideration: If relocation is necessary, do those doing it have the capacity to start over in a new town? This was not an issue with the Buckleys, who will be moving a mere two miles, and the Mitchells who moved 10. But it was for another Concord couple, Kristie and Charlie Stolper. They also carved an apartment out of the barn next to their rambling farmhouse for Kristie's father, Dave Tucker, who moved from Dallas. Fortunately, Tucker is a gregarious former IBM salesman who makes friends easily, and he was able to transplant his twin passions - barbershop singing and growing roses. He's also active in the Stolpers' church, and he recently started a new business.
There are family-wide considerations. All the siblings, not just the one who will be living next door, need to plan ahead for what to do when a parent's health fails and how to share responsibility for the caretaking. "Most people don't want to go there," said Beth Spenser, a geriatric social worker in Ann Arbor, Mich. "But I encourage these conversations way before you need them when they're much less loaded."
If the interpersonal and the practical issues do not derail you, the next hurdle is likely to be local zoning ordinances, as Kudarauskas discovered. When she proposed living next to her daughter and son-in-law, she planned to divide her large single-family house in Cambridge into two apartments. But local zoning would not allow two-family units, and she could not get a variance. To pursue the project, she had to sell her home and buy another house a few miles away in an area where two-family units are allowed.
And then there's the cost, which often has an unusual twist in this kind of project. When you recover from the actual dollar amount (which will be mind boggling if you haven't built or remodeled anything in the last 10 or 15 years), you have to work out who will be paying for it. If it's your parents, you need to discuss this with your siblings. They may be fine with the project initially (and perhaps secretly relieved that you are taking it on), but at some point they may complain that your parents sunk a large sum into your property, thereby increasing the value of your asset and lessening their share of the inheritance. To avoid this mare's nest, consult an attorney.
If the project is still feasible at this point, you're finally ready to start the design process and get the project built. Should you be extremely lucky, you can submit your project to "This Old House," as Janet Bernard did, and have them hire an architect and build it for you. More likely, you'll have to hire the architect yourself, and you'll want one who has had experience with this type of project.
Concord architect Holly Cratsley, who designed the Bernards' barn-to-cottage makeover and many other "in-law" projects, always begins by asking her clients to consider other uses for the space. After all, they will be spending a large amount to create an in-law apartment that may be used as such for only a few years. Will they be comfortable renting it out in the future to a non-family member? Can a grown child who is starting out and needs a break on rent use it? A sibling who needs a place to live?
Another wrinkle: Cratsley said that zoning can force unexpected design compromises. The Buckley's apartment is a modest 940 square feet on two floors, with living, dining and kitchen on one floor and the sleeping quarters above. Putting all the needed functions on one floor was preferable but impossible because Concord officials stipulated that the volume of the existing building could not be increased by more than 20 percent.
Should the stairs become a problem, the Buckleys can lease a chair lift for the stairs, which is much less costly than buying one. If the stairs cannot be negotiated at all, the living room can be closed off with pocket doors and turned into a bedroom, and a shower can be easily added to the first-floor bedroom.
If you can make it past all the hurdles, having two generations living next to one another can be a richly rewarding experience. For grandparents, it's an opportunity to form a bond with grandkids, especially if the latter haven't yet hit preadolescence and begun to distance themselves from parents and grandparents alike. Tucker said that since moving to Concord eight years ago, his grandchildren, who were four and six when he arrived, have added "an emotional dimension to my life I didn't have before."
Even if grandchildren are grown, as was the case for Kudarauskas, simple proximity can be enormously important. For her, living next to her daughter and family became even more vital than she had anticipated when her husband died shortly before the completion of the new living arrangement. "I'm not alone," she said, "the way you would be if you were living by yourself."
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