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ADA: Successful Restroom Renovations

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I'm Dan Hounsell, editor of Maintenance Solutions magazine. Today’s topic is, ADA and successful restroom renovations.

Restroom renovations in institutional and commercial facilities offer maintenance and engineering managers major opportunities to produce numerous benefits. Among these benefits is compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. To meet ADA requirements during renovation, managers must consider occupant count, fixture requirements, space requirements, and structural requirements.

For example, most ADA-compliance renovations result in the loss of a stall or a urinal as a result of changes to meet the 5-foot diameter requirement for stalls. If the number of existing fixtures is appropriate for the code governing the area population, the loss of a stall might require added construction costs.

Structural requirements also come into play with grab bars required in the ADA stall. Often, walls must be reinforced to accommodate the potential weight-bearing capacities of these bars.

Omitting reinforcement of existing walls when installing grab bars is problematic. For example, in one college's public restroom, the grab bar in the handicap stall was detached and hanging from the wall.

The grab bar had been installed into the wall using only mollies, which obviously could not support weight applied to the grab bar. It not only cost more money to rectify the situation at that point, but it also created a hazard and an inconvenience for the public.

RELATED CONTENT:

ADA , accessibility , restrooms , plumbing renovations