Brooke Grove Retirement Village

Pauline

I visited Brooke Grove's retirement community. They only have about 40 cottages for retirees in their independent living portion of their community. I like that independent living is separate from memory care and Alzheimer's care. I had called, and they sent me information and an invitation to a tour and an open house. I had lunch there, and it was nice. It's different and a larger campus. There were 15 of us there, and they showed us one of the cottages that had recently been vacated. It was huge, and it had a basement, three bedrooms, and two bathrooms. It was almost as big as my house. I mentioned to the lady during the tour that it's way too big for me and not what I'm looking for. She said that one is the only one they have empty at the moment, but that they do have a small, a medium, and a large cottage, which was kind of interesting. The buildings, the actual cottages, are all the same. It's a little cookie-cutter to me. They were very well kept from the outside, though, and the one we saw was prepared for the new person who was going to come in. They had painted walls and stuff like that. The thing that impressed me about the cottages was that between each cottage, there were two garages. One for the one cottage and one for the other, so you're separated. You don't share a wall between two cottages, but only share the wall with the garage, so you don't really hear anything like your neighbor's TV. I thought that was smart and a good thing to do. I was impressed with that. The outside has very neat yards with the grass cut and manicured. The shrubbery looked nice. They did say that they take care of that, but if you buy your own flowers and shrubbery, the responsibility is on the tenant. It was clean, and there was no trash anywhere. They have activities, just like everybody else has. They also have transportation, and they go to theaters, so they do a lot of stuff. The food was good. They had a kind of buffet luncheon, and I was surprised they had crab cakes and some other stuff. It was very nice. We were met at the door by the coordinator, and then they put us on a shuttle bus to take us to the one unit that they showed us. The bus driver was really nice and funny. He waited for us and brought us back to the building where we were going. We were given a video showing things that they have, like the gym and other different stuff than some of the other ones had. They didn't have that much because these are independent people and not ones that need too much interaction with the staff. They drive their own cars and have their own garages. The lady who did the presentation also answered all the questions that people had, which was good. The food was all buffet, so they didn't need anybody to be in the dining rooms, but it went smoothly and without issues.