Keeping your home safe should be one of the most important tasks in your daily life.
Despite it being a well-known fact that it is important to avoid theft, fires, or flooding, surprisingly few people know how to keep their home safe.
This is largely due to a couple of reasons. The first is that the consequences of an unsafe house are experienced by a relative minority of individuals, making it easy to take the continued safety of your home for granted.
The second is that the measures you can take to keep your home safe are not always immediately obvious. If your home has structural damage, for example, then you may not be able to identify or remedy it without professional help, so it is crucial to at least understand the risks and what to look out for, in order to minimize risk.
Here are some essential steps to take to keep your home safe.
Table of contents
Attend to any damage or structural weaknesses
One of the most critical actions you can take if you want to keep your home safe is to make sure it has no major damage or structural weaknesses.
This could include anything from flood-related water damage, fire damage, crumbling walls, foundational issues (such as subsidence), or weak mantelpieces.
Taking water damage as an example, you may not immediately recognize the signs that indicate you have an issue, or what actions to take. As a result, if you suspect that there is a problem, consult an expert to sort your water damage restoration Sanford Fl.
Educate yourself about preventable dangers
One of the key ways to keep your home safe is to understand the risks in the first place.
Ignorance about issues such as house-related crime, fire safety, flood risk, and the basic upkeep of your house leads to many avoidable incidents.
Therefore, it is a good idea to educate yourself about these issues. It doesn’t need to take long, or require you to read dry books on the subject. It could be as simple as watching a professional explaining how to complete DIY on YouTube, consulting a local neighborhood watch or police officer about security measures you can take, or taking an introductory fire safety course.
Having this foundational knowledge will help you identify potential issues within your home, and enable you to take further action yourself (or know which service to call in an emergency).
Cut back overhanging branches outside
A little-discussed risk for many households is the threat of overhanging branches outside their homes. If you live in a rural area, your property may be within close proximity of tall trees. If a storm were to hit, then heavy branches—or even the trees themselves—could fall onto your house, causing significant damage.
In extreme cases, a falling tree may even lead to serious injury or death of the occupants, so it is an important issue to address.
It is worth consulting a local tree surgeon to gather their thoughts, as well as contacting whoever owns the land that the tree stands on. It is crucial to remember that it may be their responsibility to take action, not yours, and you could get in trouble for doing the work yourself.
Fit a security system
Finally, and most obviously, if you want to keep your home safe then you should keep your exterior doors (i.e. your front and back doors) shut, as well as any gates outside, as a bare minimum.
Depending on how safe your local area is, it may also be worth investing in a security system, such as an alarm, security cameras, and motion sensors throughout your property.
Furthermore, if you keep valuable items in any outbuildings (such as cars, boats, toolboxes), then it is worth blocking the passage of criminals by parking a less valuable car in front of these items, and fitting fences and an electric gate.