Making your home safe

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The chances are that you already have a gate for your home, fencing around your backyard and smoke alarms in the ceiling. Your home is your castle and it should be protected as such. You baby proof a house to keep the baby safe, so you have to remember to protect yourself and the rest of the family, too. Understanding the best way to make your home safe will ensure that you are managing your home properly and protecting your insurance, too.

Home protection is vital if you want to keep on top of your insurance and make sure that you are able to live in a safe house. From speaking to the inspectors about fire dampers in the house to testing the smoke alarms and changing the batteries, there are things that you can do to make your home as safe as possible. Below, we’ve put together a list of things that you can do to get on top of home safety.

1. Keep up with the smoke alarms. We talked about smoke alarm safety, but you need to actually keep up with testing them. The fire brigade is great at helping with this and they can often come and make sure that your fire alarms are sorted for free. Most home fire deaths that occur happen because of smoke inhalation and not actual fire. If your smoke alarms are working, you can ensure that you are safe.
   
2. Find the hazards. A risk assessment of the house is not a bad idea. Walking through your house and identifying the places you can trip and fall is smart. You can then fix these and not worry about you or any of your family getting hurt and needing to claim on your insurance. Falls can cause major issues at home and you want to avoid this as much as possible. 
   
3. Secure the cabinets. The bleach cupboards, the medicine cupboards and all poisons should be kept out of the reach of children and adults in your house. You need everyone to remain safe and if you know that your poisons are out of the way, the better!
   
4. Are you smart? It’s a question you might find easy to answer, but what we mean is that you have to be smart in your home. You want to know the stove is off when you leave the kitchen and that you keep your glass dishes away from the edge of the units. 
   
5. Keep the family safe by water. Do you have a pool? How about a bathtub? You need to make sure that the whole house is aware of how to behave around water. If you have a pool, have a gate installed and make a point of keeping your kids away from all sources of water.
   

To continue to create a safe home, you should consider it much like you would a healthy lifestyle. You can only achieve a healthy life if you work on it, and you can only achieve a healthy home if you keep on top of it.