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How to Install an Elevator in your Living Room!

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A YouTube tech reviewer just turned his living room floor into an elevator shaft.

Zack Nelson built his name on YouTube by torturing smartphones — bending them, scratching them, dunking them in water for his channel JerryRigEverything. On July 22, 2019, he pointed that same hands-on approach at his own house, publishing a 13-minute video called “How to Install an Elevator in your Living Room!” The project wasn’t a stunt for views. It was a real accessibility overhaul for his fiancée, Cambry Kaylor, who was paralyzed after an equestrian accident when she was 18.

• Nelson cut a direct opening through his second-story living room floor to install a Stiltz home lift, since the house wasn’t originally built with an elevator shaft or closet lift in mind.
• The install took roughly four days total — two days of framing, structural work, and drywalling the floor opening, then two more days assembling and testing the lift itself.
• The finished lift is fully electric and includes obstruction sensors and internal safety stops, features Nelson walks through in detail in the video.

Retrofitting a House That Was Never Built for This

Most homes designed for wheelchair accessibility get that way from the ground up — wider doorways, zero-step entries, a shaft already framed into the blueprints. Nelson’s house had none of that. To get Cambry between floors without stairs, he had to go straight through the living room ceiling below and the living room floor above, cutting an opening large enough for a compact residential lift car to pass through cleanly.

That kind of retrofit is exactly why home elevator projects get expensive and complicated fast — you’re not just buying a machine, you’re restructuring load-bearing floor sections and running new framing around the opening. Nelson documented that structural phase as the first half of the build, spending two full days on framing, drywall, and getting the opening squared away before the lift hardware ever showed up.

Four Days, Two Phases

The timeline breaks cleanly into two chunks. Days one and two were construction: cutting the floor, framing the shaft opening, and finishing the drywall around it. Days three and four were mechanical — assembling the Stiltz lift itself and running it through testing before it went into daily use.

Stiltz lifts are built specifically for retrofits like this one, designed to run without a traditional pit or full machine room the way older hydraulic elevators require. That’s part of why Nelson could get the whole project done in about four days instead of the weeks-long timelines and major renovations typically associated with adding a full elevator to an existing multistory home.

Safety Features Nelson Highlighted

Nelson spent a good portion of the video on the lift’s built-in safety systems, treating them as the actual point of the project rather than a footnote. Obstruction sensors and internal safety stops both got specific callouts on camera.

Safety is in our… like top five priorities over here. Obviously.

That line, straight from Nelson in the video, sums up the tone of the whole build — practical, a little dry, but genuinely focused on getting Cambry a lift she could trust to use every day without a second thought.

Implications for Accessible Home Design

Nelson was upfront that residential lifts aren’t cheap, but he framed the electric Stiltz option as a relatively quiet, practical middle ground for homeowners retrofitting an existing multistory house rather than building accessible from scratch. It’s the same instinct that drives a lot of the ambitious build-it-yourself content that does well on YouTube — creators like the one behind Turning $0.01 Into a House in 1 Week take on a physical construction challenge and document every messy step of it rather than polishing over the hard parts.

For a channel built on stress-testing gadgets, this was Nelson stress-testing his own house — and showing, floor cut by floor cut, that making a two-story home wheelchair-accessible after the fact is a solvable problem, not a hypothetical one.

Nelson closes the video with the lift already in daily use, Cambry riding it between floors on her own. No word yet on whether he’s got another home-improvement video queued up next, but for a channel that usually spends its time snapping phone screens in half, watching him frame a floor opening instead was a pretty good change of pace.