Rangie: Your husband’s medical issues puts a whole new light on your original question.
When my mother started to show severe short term memory loss (in her late 80’s), the nurse recommended this *book. It helped my sister and me enormously. It is a short and easy read
Senile dementia and Alzheimer’s manifest themselves differently. My mother has only dementia and never gets angry or hard to reason with. But my sister and I had to put away our needs and feelings of guilt and do what was best for her, which is, and was, to keep her life simple, calm and free from any unnecessary anxiety.
I will call her tomorrow at 10:30 to remind her to get her toenails cut at the beauty salon at 11:45. I will remind her where the beauty salon is. I can’t call earlier because she will not have her hearing aids in and thus, not hear the phone.
I would strongly suggest you hold off on any interior renovations until you get your husband diagnosed and perhaps medicated. There is no miracle drug but there is Aricept, which slows the progression.
* “Learning to Speak Alzheimer’s: A Groundbreaking Approach for Everyone Dealing with the Disease”: by Joann Koenig Coste. http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Speak-Alzheimers-Groundbreaking-Approach/dp/0618485171