31: Is your home ready for any challenges being thrown your way?
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Welcome to episode 31 of Permission to be Messy. I'm your host, JoAnn Krall and today I'm asking the question is your home ready for any challenges being thrown your way? Initially I was going to title this is your home ready for a disaster? But I'm really not going to go into disaster preparedness and not everything I'm going to be talking about is a disaster. But I do want to mention, I usually talk about this during fire prevention month, which I believe is in October. Clutter in your home, we always want to make sure that if any emergency people had to come in, whether it was a fire or a flood that they could easily get through the space. And that if there's a fire that there's not a lot of stuff blocking walls, because sometimes fires start in the walls and you want to make sure that they can get into them easily. We personally took a lightning strike. gosh, I don't even know how many years ago. And we thought our garage was on fire and I panicked because while my home is not cluttered. There was a lot of stuff up against the walls in the garage and I thought every second counts, but thankfully there was no fire. It was all good. And we made sure to remedy that situation. And then with flooding, if there's any areas of your home that would be susceptible to flooding. You want to make sure that everything's up off the ground and you don't have a lot of clutter. Because, cleaning up water is a nightmare in itself, but when there's clutter floating around in it, not only does stuff get ruined, but it gets in the way and it can really hinder the cleanup. Floods are pain in the butt but they also can cause mold. So we want to make sure that we get them cleaned up quickly. So not having all the stuff on the floor, having it raised up. Now, of course, if your basement fills completely up then you're still going you're going to have stuff, hopefully that isn't going to happen and that's a rare occurrence for most people.
What prompted me to talk about this week was my husband actually injured his knee a couple of weeks ago. We were praying he didn't need surgery because he's already had two orthopedic surgeries in the past four years. One on his shoulder for torn I'm torn tendons, and then he had a full ankle replacement. That one was fun. But this time around he injured his knee. So he had knee surgery. He literally had an MRI on a Monday and they were like, we can do the surgery Friday. So I had to do a lot of prep. making sure that, I knew I could get work done. I could get him settled,get, make sure that we had food ready because I knew I was going to be working. but the one thing that I didn't have to do was declutter my home, which I was grateful for. So when you have somebody coming into your home on crutches, or maybe even a wheelchair, You want to make sure they can get around and not fall and there is, not a lot of tripping hazards. We already have two little dogs, so those are tripping hazards on their own, but I didn't have to do that piece and I was grateful for that. Look around your home and look around at the clutter. You may not have an excessive amount of clutter. Just picture somebody trying to navigate through the home and. And even just for yourself, if you have elderly family or friends, look around their homes and, get a feel for how easily they can move around the space, but also if something were to happen to them and EMT has had to come into the home. Make sure they can navigate easily because like I said, every second counts when there's an emergency. and we don't want to create emergencies by having people fall.
So while we don't want to ever think that we're going to have to deal with challenges or deal with disasters. If you think about it in this way, and you set things up so that you would be prepared. Hopefully nothing will ever happen and the benefit will be, you'll be living in a clutter-free space.
So this episode is probably going to be one of my shortest episodes other than my intro episode.
Because I am dealing with challenges this week. But I think we're going to get through it. Right now, I'm relishing in the fact that I'm able to get the bedding done because my husband was finally able to shower after four days and he's feeling good. I'm feeling good.
And I'm off to get some work done and I'm wishing you much progress, peace, purpose, and the permission to be messy. Thanks for listening.
