Ángel, who had been a painter for decades, once again puts a tool from his trade to a new use.
Since he began using a wheelchair, the small lip in the concrete between the garage and the driveway could give him real trouble. If the wheels of his chair hit it head on, it could jolt him forward. He didn’t need a ramp exactly—it was quite a small lip—so he tried something else: a paint stirring stick.
So, one day, he grabbed a stir stick from his stash and put a couple of them just along the lip. What it does is mitigate the drop or the height he has to get over with the wheel. Because if you don’t hit that lip square on,”you’re not going up. It’s stop.” This made it hard for his wife too, if she was pushing him up the driveway after getting out of the car.
When I asked him how he got the stir stick to stay on the ground, he simply laughed and said, “Gravity.” As a note, there are such things as “threshold ramps” that are small and meant for these kinds of lips. Some are made of rubber, some aluminum. But a painters stick is certainly a budget hack!