Wanting a parent to stay in their own home usually starts as a vague, heavy worry: the house “isn’t really set up for this anymore.” And it stays vague, because “make the house safer” isn’t a task — it has no first step and no end. The Aging-in-Place & Home-Safety Modification Planner turns that worry into a list, and then into an order.
It’s a spreadsheet workbook (Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice) plus three PDF guides — your family’s own file about your family’s house, not a rented app or a contractor’s portal.
Walk the house against 62 checks
The heart of it is a room-by-room Home-Safety Assessment: 62 pre-loaded checks across eight areas — the entrance, hallways and stairs, living areas, the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, laundry and utility, and the whole home. Each check carries the reason it’s on the list and a pre-set severity from 1 to 5. You walk the house and set a Finding — OK, Needs work, or Not applicable — and the scoring happens on its own.
It’s honest about what it doesn’t know. Mark what your home doesn’t have as Not applicable and it drops out of the math, so a single-story home is never penalized for stairs it doesn’t have. And a room nobody has walked reads “Not assessed” — never “Looking good,” because an unchecked room is unknown, not safe.
The cheap high-impact fixes go first
Move each Needs work finding onto the Modification Plan, set a safety benefit and a rough cost, and the planner ranks the whole list by safety gained per dollar — benefit × 5 ÷ its cost band (a rough price tier). Higher goes first, sorted into Do first / Do next / Do later.
This is the part that surprises people. In the worked example, the $25 pack of non-slip strips and the grab bar rise above the $8,500 walk-in shower. That’s not a shortcut — it’s the order that actually gets things done. The expensive idea is usually why nothing happens, because it needs a decision and the decision keeps getting postponed. Meanwhile the tub still has no bar.
Ten connected tabs
- Home-Safety Assessment — the 62 checks and the scoring engine, color-coded by risk.
- Room Risk Summary — your rooms ranked worst-first by severity-weighted risk, so you know where to start.
- Modification Plan — the priority engine above, ranked by safety per dollar.
- Contractor & Quotes — log what each contractor quotes; it pulls your own estimate across and flags a quote that comes in well over.
- Budget & Spend — planned, committed, and actual spend rolled up against the budget you set.
- Completed Work Record — what’s done, when, who did it, and where the receipt and warranty live.
- Dashboard — the whole picture on one screen: risk by room, your top five priorities in order, plan progress, and budget used.
- Documents & Coverage — where the quotes, receipts, and permits live (locations, never account numbers).
- Plus a Read Me and a finishable Start Here Checklist that counts what’s done for you.
More than a spreadsheet — three guides
The Start Here Guide walks you through how to walk the house, how the scoring works, and why the cheap changes go first. It also has a section most checklists never mention: the hard conversation. You’re proposing to change a parent’s home — which, from the other side of the table, can sound like “you are declining.” The guide covers how to do this with someone rather than to them: bring the list, not the verdict; lead with the cheap and reversible; let them help rank it. The planner does the criticizing, so you don’t have to.
The Room-by-Room Playbook lays out all 62 checks with the reason each matters, and spells out the methodology. The Printable Walkthrough Pages are clipboard pages for the walk, so you can do it with a pen and type the findings in later — or not at all.
Why not just a free fall-prevention checklist?
A free checklist gives you the checks. It doesn’t give you an order — no severities, no costs, no way to tell which of forty things to do on Saturday. This planner scores what you find and ranks what to do about it, and it shows its work so you can argue with it. (Want to try before you buy? The free Home-Safety Walkthrough Checklist is a printable room-by-room list of the higher-risk checks — the walk without the scoring engine.) The 62 checks draw on the public fall-prevention guidance that already exists (the CDC’s Check for Safety checklist, the National Institute on Aging’s room-by-room guidance, and AARP’s HomeFit Guide) — but those are lists, not rankings. The severities and the safety-per-dollar ranking are this planner’s own.
Also a native Google Sheet — one click, no import
Prefer Google Sheets? You don’t import anything. The bundle includes a clickable “Make a copy” link — click it and the whole planner lands in your Google Drive, the scoring and the ranking already set up and tested. It also opens natively in Excel and LibreOffice.
Own it, don’t rent it
This is your family’s file about your family’s house. It doesn’t live in a contractor’s portal, a hospital system, or an app that might shut down, and it holds no logins, policy numbers, or account details. Send it to a sibling, or bring it to an occupational-therapy appointment. It’s a plain workbook you own — structure you keep, sitting between a blank spreadsheet and a rented app. One caution the guide covers in a full page: a finished assessment is a map of a home’s weak points, so keep it with the people who need it and give a contractor only the specific rows they’re quoting, not the whole file.
A plan you keep — not professional advice
This planner helps a family organize its own home-safety assessment, plan, and records. It is not medical, occupational-therapy, legal, or building-code advice, not a safety certification or an inspection, and not a substitute for a professional. The 62 checks are a starting point, not an exhaustive list, and they cannot see your home. For an assessment of a specific person in a specific home, ask a doctor for a referral to an occupational therapist. Grab bars, stair rails, ramps, and electrical work must be properly anchored and installed to be safe. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any agency, insurer, or contractor.
