Introducing a new member of the family can bring its own special requirements and challenges. If you’re having your first child, it’s unlikely your home has been designed with a baby in mind. Here are some tips for turning your love nest into a kid-safe haven.

See it from their perspective

Take a seat on the floor and have a look around you. You’ll be at toddler height and able to see any hazards at their level. Are there sharp coffee table corners? A bookshelf that can easily be grabbed and pulled over? A crawl space that would be hard to retrieve a child from? There’s no point looking at kid-safing your house if you’re only looking from an adult perspective – you may miss vital hazards that could cause problems later on.

Bring on the bolts

It is essential that you bolt anything to the wall that could fall on your child. If your little one climbs the bookshelf when you leave the room to grab their bottle, there is a real risk the bookshelf could fall on them if it’s not bolted to the wall. Bring in the professionals to expertly affix bookshelves and other heavy items like cabinets, dressers, chests of drawers and cupboards to the wall so that you won’t have to worry about accidents happening to your child.

Design your home with your child in mind

If children are on the cards, it’s a good idea to design your home from the beginning as a kid-safe environment. If you’re using an expert, like Coral Homes, you’ll be able to tell them to take steps in the design to ensure your children, either present or future, will not be put at risk. They can suggest all sorts of ways to make your new home kid-safe, like using non-toxic paints, selecting a stove that’s more child friendly (like induction as opposed to gas) and putting electrical outlets out of the way of little hands, like in the backs of cupboards, where possible.

Cover outlets

Purchase electrical outlet covers to put over outlets you aren’t currently using. They’re inexpensive but they can save you from a disaster. If you can’t find them, covering the outlet with electrical tape will do in a pinch.

Constantly review

The measures you put in place when your baby is crawling are different from those that will be necessary when they’re toddling, so you have to constantly review your kid-safe measures to make sure you’re always providing the highest level of care for your little ones. Take your child’s personality into consideration too – if you have a climber, you’ll need to take extra measures to make sure they aren’t constantly at risk of injury. Make sure drawers are always closed so they don’t use them as ladders, and ensure the floor of their room has cushy carpet so that if they climb out of their cot, they’ll at least have a soft landing.

Having a baby is an exciting time of life, so make sure you get these kid-safing measures out of the way as soon as possible, so you can enjoy welcoming this new tiny person into your world.