The Part of a Makeover Nobody Films: Hauling for Sunshine on a Ranney Day
For most of us a bathroom is a room. For a family raising a child who uses a wheelchair, it is the hardest twenty minutes of the day, every day, and it carries a real risk of someone getting hurt.
Sunshine on a Ranney Day exists to fix that. The Roswell nonprofit was founded in 2012 by Peter and Holly Ranney, and it builds wheelchair accessible bathrooms, dream bedrooms and in-home therapy rooms for children with special needs across Georgia, at no cost to the family.
This year 11Alive followed one of them. Adrian is 19. He was born extremely premature during Hurricane Katrina, he loves music and art, and until January he and his mom Cynthia had to manage bathing in a room that was never built for it. Sunshine on a Ranney Day gave him a roll in shower, a layout designed to take the strain and the danger out of the routine, and a bedroom he can roll into for the first time. They built it around him, right down to the zebras and the nod to Puerto Rico.
His mom put the change plainly. “It’s easier to carry him from one place to another,” Cynthia told 11Alive.
Our part
We donated the bins and the hauling. No cost to the charity, no cost to the family.
That is deliberately a short paragraph, because it was a small part of the job. The designers, the contractors and the donors who funded Adrian’s build did the work that shows up in the reveal video. We moved the old bathroom out of the way so they could get started.
Why a gut renovation needs the bin on site first
An accessible bathroom is not a cosmetic update. Making a room wheelchair accessible usually means the floor comes up, the walls come out, and the tub and the old fixtures go. Doorways get widened. Framing gets moved. All of it in a house that is still being lived in, by a family already managing a great deal.
Which means the debris cannot sit in the yard for three weeks.
Old tile and backer board are heavy and sharp. A cast iron tub is awkward and dangerous to move twice. Demolition debris with exposed fasteners has no business in a driveway a family walks past every day. The fastest and safest version of this job is a bin in the driveway on day one, filled as the room comes apart, and gone before the new work starts.
It is also why driveway protection matters more here than almost anywhere. These are family homes, and the driveway we are parking on is often the same one used for a ramp or a wheelchair van transfer. Nothing we do can leave a mark on it.
Why we keep doing these
We are a local, veteran owned company running our own trucks and our own drivers out of Douglasville. A donated bin costs us a bin and a haul. For a nonprofit putting every dollar into a child’s bathroom, it is one line off the budget that goes straight back into the build.
We have worked with Sunshine on a Ranney Day for years, and we do the same for NARI Cares, Paws Atlanta and Douglas County September Saturdays. There is more about that on our community page.
If you want to support them directly, they take applications from Georgia families and they run Sunny & Ranney in Roswell, a home furnishings store whose proceeds fund the next makeover. That is a better use of your money than anything we could ask you for.
And if you are a contractor doing accessibility work, or a nonprofit with a build coming up, get in touch. We would rather hear about it early than read about it afterward.