Willowood Manor

Virginia

I live in Willowood Manor. You have to be 62 in order to move in the apartment building. There are elevators. They have steps you can use if you want, but you don't have to. It's independent living for seniors. I've been here for 13 years. They have maintenance to take care of anything you need doing, like your light bulbs changed or things like that. They don't have nursing care or anything like that. It's for people that can live by themselves or live with a little help. Most of the residents have aides or help here. The staff is fantastic. They're great people. I've never had any problems in the 13 years I've lived here with the staff at all. They're prompt with taking care of things. It's almost like family. We have a community room. We have a patio. If you want to have like a little family get-together or something, you can rent the community room and you get to use the kitchen and the patio. They're always having different meetings and different people coming in to explain things like about driving or about grocery shopping, pointers from everyone on how to handle things. They're good-sized rooms because all the doorways are wide enough for you to fit your walker or a riding walker. The doors are big enough and having just the elevators is a big help, too, because you don't have to carry groceries or anything up and down steps. It's much more convenient. Before my surgeries, I used to call bingo for the building, and we get about 20, 25 people come down out of the 70 apartments we have. We have a social director here also. She helps you with any problems you have with your food allotment or your checks or benefits or medical care or anything like that. We have a podiatrist who comes every other month. We have different people like that to help people out. You can get Meals on Wheels if you want, but you're on your own as far as your food and your groceries. It's up to you to take care of. We even have a senior center right across the parking lot from us. If you need rides to the store or something, they have little buses that will take you and pick you up. The senior center has got all kinds of activities and movies and things like that for senior people. It's kind of connected and everybody knows everybody from back and forth, and other residents or other people that don't live in assisted living or who don't live in Willowood, that live in their own homes and everything in Fairview Park, they come up there so you get to meet other people. It's a HUD building. It's a government building. Some of the tenants need more particular care than they're getting and Willowood is blocked on that because it's up to the family and to the person what they're going to do. What would make it better is to give Willowood the power to weed out the residents that are having too much of a problem or need more help than they were able to get here. Some of these people just feel that they're entitled and they expect the building to do everything for them. It's independent living, so you can't depend on the building for those kinds of things, but yet the residents seem to. I'm pretty comfortable and pretty settled in my ways here and I'm very happy with the way I'm living right now.