‘When you fix houses, you fix lives’
OKC man is one of national group’s elite dozen Master Instructors
For baby boomer Jack Werner, work sometimes hits close to home. “We live in a 100-year-old house in Putnam Heights,” Werner, 69, said of himself and his wife, Suzanne Broadbent. “Suzanne and I go up and down those stairs 50 times a day. And if you love where you live and you want to stay there, functionally you’re going to have to make some adaptations.”
Adjustments can range from the simple, such as strategically placed hand rails, to more elaborate, such as elevators. But none of this is new to Werner, owner of A to Z Inspections in Oklahoma City.
He has been teaching courses on aging-in-place, universal design and other accessibility issues through the National Association of Home Builders for years. In July, he was elevated as a Master Instructor, one of only 12 in the national group and
the sole Master Instructor in Oklahoma.
“With his degrees in construction and finance, Jack is most qualified to teach NAHB courses,” said Mike Means, executive director of the Oklahoma State Home Builders Association.
“We are fortunate to have his expertise here in our state to offer NAHB courses to our community.”
Werner has honed his expertise over years of crawling around houses and fixing them, even back when he was flexing his finance degree as an agent and broker for John Hancock Insurance in Oklahoma City. He worked at nights and on weekends, mostly fixing up homes to rent.
“That’s just something I always did,” he said.
Growing up in Duncan, he watched an uncle who, in today’s parlance, flipped houses.
“He made a lot of money by moving into the worst possible house in the best possible neighborhood he could afford and fixing it up,” Werner said. “He’d sell it, and then two years later he’d do it again. The man wasn’t always happy, but he built up quite a bit of wealth due to that. It always interested me, so I started doing that when I returned from Vietnam.”
Werner did two tours of duty in Vietnam with the U.S. Army Rangers from 1966 to 1970.
“I served with some great guys over there, and I saw some of them come back with missing parts and pretty severely damaged,” he said. “So I was cognizant (of those challenges).”
‘Aging-in-place friendly’
That stayed with him over the years, and when the National Association of Home Builders rolled out its Certified Aging in Place certification in 2010, Werner was among the first to go through the training.
Aging-in-place specialists learn the ins and outs of designing or retrofitting a home to make it accessible to wheelchairs and walkers, helpful to users regardless of age.
Wider doors and wheelchair ramps may be obvious solutions, but making a home safe can be as subtle as clearing clutter and installing better lights to eliminate tripping hazards, Werner said.
“And it can all be done beautifully. It’s certainly not going to hurt anything,” he said.
Now he teaches courses for Certified Aging in Place specialists, as well as in universal design/ build, an approach that creates homes that can be adapted to various stages of life.
Wider hallways and doors, for example, can be a luxurious touch at one point, but vital to mobility at another. And walls can be reinforced at key points so grab bars can be installed later.
“It’s basically building from the ground up to make a home aging-in-place friendly,” said Vic Vickers, owner of Handymen R’ Us in Oklahoma City.
Vickers took NAHB courses with an eye toward the market, “I could see this aging-inplace was going to be a good niche for us to fill by being qualified educationally, because we can pretty much do anything if we just know what we can do,” he said.
Though the courses are offered through the homebuilders group, Werner said he often finds himself teaching a wide variety of professionals — attorneys, business people, trades, medical professionals, a wide swath that comes, learns and, in turn, carries the information back to their realm.
“This information is all around us, but we just don’t bring it together,” said Will Blake, owner of Vesta Foundation Solutions, 4609 S Rockwell Avenue. Werner, he said, helps connect the dots. “We take that back to our team, and then they have all the resources.”
The training is thorough, said Kendra Orcutt, an occupational therapist who lends her expertise to home design as coowner of Home Mods by Therapists of Oklahoma City. At Werner’s urging, she got her Certified Aging in Place certification.
Not sure if that was adequate, though, she decided to pursue additional training that would land her a certification shared by only a handful of other people in the country: the Specialty Certificate in Environmental Modifications from the Association of Occupational Therapists of America. It proved to be easier than she thought.
“Half of the things I was supposed to do for that certification I had done already because I was involved with Jack’s work,” she said.
Werner might shrug off the praise, though. “I’m just the teacher,” he said. “These people are the ones who put it together. When you fix houses, you fix lives.”
“This information is all around us, but we just don’t bring it together. Werner helps. We take that back to our team, and then they have all the resources.”
WILL BLAKE, owner of Vesta Foundation Solutions