Take Your First Steps to Home Safety
Maintaining a modern home requires many dangerous chemicals and devices that are threats to home safety. Especially if there are any children in the home, the utmost care should be used to properly stow or protect these hazards. These may seem like simple measures and full of just common sense, but death and injury result from ignoring the precautions every year.
Home safety doesn’t require blazing yellow and orange signs around hazardous areas or barricades to dangerous places. It just requires some fairly simple and common sense adjustments to your lifestyle to prevent accidents. People are very conditioned to convenience and often sacrifice safety concepts to make life easier.
Furniture can be a painful problem for shins, knees, and elbows if the proper spacing is not maintained due to squeezing it all in a hall or room. The government sets safety standards at about 30 inches for walkway clearances between furniture and other obstacles. Many hallways or rooms do not meet this standard and have not been adjusted for the actual size needs of the family.
Corners can also be lower in nature and become a danger to ankles and shins. Bruising is the normal result along with pain, but the overall damage is usually minimal. If the house has older occupants with fragile bones the threat is obviously much higher.
Many homes have a mixture of carpet, wood floors, and tile or vinyl in the kitchen and bathroom areas. The transition areas that border the different types of flooring can be home safety difficulties. The trim used for the border can trip people or the nails holding the trim can come loose over time. Just the different heights of the surfaces can cause careless walkers to stumble at best.
Bathrooms can be wet and messy venues, requiring many strong cleaning products using hazardous chemicals. For ease of use, many people store these supplies under the sink or nearby. Due to the danger, the chemicals should be locked away or put up in an elevated place that is not as easy to access. All of the containers should have child-proof lids to add extra home safety to the situation.
Walking inside the house is not the only home safety hazard of interest but the outside walks and decks need attention too. Concrete will crack and lift with age to create problems and wooden deck boards often warp after time. Both of these create uneven surfaces for walking that can cause tripping.
Sharp and hot objects are another danger in the kitchen to take precautions against. Knives are essential to food preparation, but need to be stored in a wood block or drawer. Stove tops and ovens need precautions as well to note if the heat is on and to avoid contact.
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August 04 2008 | home security | No Comments »