Safety First – Childproofing Your Home

While families love to buy real estate for the picture postcard environment, keeping the family safe in the home is always the number one priority. For those with young children especially, this means ensuring a few precautions are taken to prevent the naturally curious little scamps from hurting themselves.

From falling or slipping in the home to exploring drawers and cabinets they shouldn’t be, or even deciding to go out and investigating all by themselves, taking a few simple steps to childproof your real estate will go a long way to keeping your children safe and your mind at rest.

Don’t fall for it

While it’s inevitable that young children will spend a lot of time falling over as they are growing up, ensuring most of these will all have soft landings is an easy way to help your real estate remain a happy home.

The single worst place your child could fall is on the stairs, so installing safety gates at both the top and bottom is essential in childproofing your multi-storey real estate. These types of gates can also be used to keep your children out of rooms that may contain other hazards, such as bathrooms or the kitchen.

Other falls from high places can be prevented by ensuring there is no way for your child to climb. Avoid furniture arrangements that allow climbing from one piece to another, or give access to windows and other ledges.

Be quick on the drawer

Children are highly visual creatures, and nothing catches their eye more than bright and shiny objects. This unfortunately means detergent bottles can easily be confused with a fruit drink, medicine or pills for candy, or knives and other kitchenware for toys.

Storing these items on high is sensible, but installing locks on cabinets in your real estate is recommended for those with young families.

Some locks rely on a lever that must be held when opening the drawer, while others use a magnetic key that can be stored out of reach. For added safety, installing finger pinch guards can help prevent injuries when your child is old enough to take their toys and clothes from their cabinets.

Safety in the home

In the warm summer months, most children love playing outside in the yard. For families living in real estate, ensuring your children cannot escape and reach the waterfront is especially important.

Fitting safety gates to prevent them from leaving your property is highly recommended, even for those children who will be supervised at all times.

Even when children aren’t playing outside, they may want to explore all by themselves. With this in mind, one of the best ways to ensure they can’t wander out on their own is to install window locks and tall chain locks on exterior doors.