10 Essential Home Safety Tips

Your home is your family's safe haven.

It's the place you return to each evening, leaving the workday worries - and the outside world - behind once you close the front door.

While your walls provide a safe refuge within which you can weather the storms of daily life, ensuring your family's physical safety requires some extra precautions.

Here are 10 safety essentials for your home and family.

1. Be Prepared for An Emergency.

1 Create a first-aid kit.

Keep emergency numbers in every family member's cell phone; and by the home phone (if you have one).

Be sure to include an out-of-town friend or relative as a contact person to call should a local disaster strand family members scattered about your town.

2. Prevent Household Accidents.

Each year, millions of people are injured at home - injuries that could have been prevented with a few simple safeguards.

A few of the best that you'll want to use in your home:

-- Make sure entrances are well lit to prevent outside falls;

-- Keep walkways, stairs, and halls clear to prevent inside slip-ups;

-- Place nonslip stickers or a bathmat on the tub or shower floor;

-- Turn the hot water heater to no more than 120 Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius); and

-- Be sure to stash an emergency flashlight in plain sight in the guest room.

3. Be Prepared for a Fire.

-- Keep a fire extinguisher in the kitchen, garage, and near bedrooms so you're prepared in the event you awake to smoke or flames.

-- Install ceiling smoke detectors in each bedroom; and place one in the hallway leading to them. Test monthly but replace batteries yearly.

4. Eliminate Environmental Hazards.

If your home was built before 1978, it may contain asbestos around furnaces, pipes, heat ducts, and boilers; in the adhesive backing beneath your linoleum floor; or be hiding in those oh-so-70s "cottage cheese" ceilings.

The dust of this carcinogen can cause serious lung ailments when inhaled. Give it a wide berth if it's intact; call an expert if it crumbles to have it safely removed from your home.

Lead paint, another common hazard found in homes built before 1980, has also made the environmental dishonor roll.

Lead-tainted dust can spiral into the air when cleaning walls or window sills, and if enough is ingested or inhaled, this toxin can cause permanent brain damage and other serious injuries, especially to children, moms-to-be and older adults.

Test old painted surfaces for lead; if they contain it, paint or wallpaper over them with lead-free paint or toxin-free wallpaper.

Radon gas is another air-born toxin we want to keep out of our homes for good reason: It's the second leading cause of lung cancer.

Typically, this odorless element moves up through the ground soil beneath your home and seeps inside through cracks in the foundation and gaps in floors.

Once inside, it can build to dangerous levels. Test for radon gas (test kits are available online) at least once a year.

5. Prevent Intruders.

Whether your home is humble or palatial, there's probably something inside it of interest to thieves.

One of the simplest and most effective ways to deter burglars from breaking into your apartment or home is to walk around its perimeter and look for easy ways you might be able to gain acess to the interior.

Big tree with branches reaching doors or windows? Trim back bushes and trees near these entry points. This is a doubly good ideas because thick trees or shrubbery provide a perfect cover for intruders, allowing them to work undetected by you or your neighbors.

Don't overlook ladders, trash cans, or garden tools - anything that could be of assistance to a burglar in getting into your home - and promptly remove these items from the yard.

As an extra precaution: Coat metal drainpipes up to the second floor with petroleum jelly to keep burglars from getting a firm hold and climbing up the pipes to get inside your home.

Add safe, secure locks to first- and second-story windows. (In bedrooms, leave one window lock-free to serve as an emergency exit.)

Put a broom handle or metal bar in tracks of sliding-glass doors (unless door is an emergency exit).

Replace hollow-core front doors with metal or solid wood to prevent a determined (and unwanted guest) from gaining access inside by force.

Finally, install a dead-bolt safety lock on the front door.

6. Beware the Spare.

Don't use the well-known under-the-doormat as the place you stash that spare key for when the kids forget theirs. (Or you do.)

Sure, no one will forget. No one including a wandering burglar who turns up on your doorstep. Why make it easy for someone to walk in - and out - with your stuff?

Instead, choose a place only you and the family know about and stash the spare there. If needed, place the key in a plastic baggie to keep it dry and bug-free.

7. Engrave Valuable Items.

Chances are your easy-to-fence, high-end electronics will be a prime focus of any burglar. After all, they're easy to sell for quick cash at the local pawn shop and unless you've taken precautions, they're almost impossible to trace back to the rightful owner.

Take the time now to have your name or other identifying information engraved on these valuable items. It's the rare pawn shop that will buy an item with such clear owner identification, making it much less likely a thief will take it.(And yes, they know this trick too so they'll probably be looking.)

Finally, ake pictures of your most expensive, prized items. This will come in handy should you need to file a theft report with your home insurer and local law enforcement.

8. Be Alarmed at Home.

An annoyingly loud alarm system is one of the best ways to keep the bad guys out.

There are do-it-yourself options, such as an exterior perimeter alarm that will shriek when your home's boundaries are encroached.

Motion-sensor lights, affixed well out of reach in your yard or around the perimeter of your home, will also help discourage a nighttime prowler - though silently, of course.

The last thing a burglar wants is to be seen. Keep your outside porch light on all night as well. Lights are your least expensive insurance policy against unwanted intruders.

9. Have a Family Survival Kit Ready.

Stash enough food, water, and other daily essentials to last your family 72 hours after a major disaster in your personal home disaster survival kit. While you can buy ready-made emergency kits, it's less expensive and more personal to create your own, tailored to your family's needs, wants, and food preferences.

10. Also Be Prepared for the Unexpected.

While they may never happen to you, fire, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes (and hurricanes) and other catastrophes strike millions of homes and families each year.

So it's only prudent to prepare for them if you're living in an area prone to any of these. You'll sleep much better at night knowing that home, sweet home, is also home, safe home.