Home Safety The First Frontier

Your home is a place of security and relief from the pressures of the outside world and most people feel relaxed upon entering their domicile. This is one of the contributing factors to statistics demonstrating that most accidents occur in the home and often by inattention to dangers. Home safety needs to be the first frontier to tackle in protecting yourself and your loved ones from accidents.

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.

Less obvious as home safety problems are counters and tables with sharp corners. For adults the corners represent a danger to knees, thighs, elbows, and hips. Many large bruises are gained every day from bumping into the corner of a piece of furniture. If there are young kids in the house, those corners become threats to the head, eyes, and shoulders. As children develop, they often are not looking ahead to what dangers lay at head level.

Shelves in closets and storage areas in general are very often victims of clutter and overloading. It is a classic cartoon notion for the closet door to open and everything fall out on the hapless character involved. In real life it is not funny and can be painful. Overloaded shelves can fall on a head or body at any time to cause injury.

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.

The kitchen is an area where chemicals are used to clean and sanitize surfaces daily. Many of these chemicals are hazardous to contact, inhale, or swallow. To provide quick access and easy use of the cleaning products, they are often stored under the sink or in a nearby cabinet. Home safety is greatly improved when the items are put up and away, preferably in a locked cabinet.

If you are a late night kitchen raider, bathroom user, or child checker the dark halls can be dangerous. Using nightlights can save many painful and embarrassing falls in the middle of the night. Stair areas are of special interest for nighttime lighting to create a safe environment during needed trips.