Simple Senior-Friendly Home Improvements with Brenda Scott

hey good afternoon I'm so glad you guys are here today I'm here with Brenda Scott she's a professional home organizer and the owner of Tidy Myspace specializing in organizing homes for those that are aging in place and I'm super excited that you guys are here with me today I am really excited that we get to have this conversation because we are talking about organizing and cleaning homes for our parents for those that are our clients for those that are our neighbors people that we are close to i

t could be relatives it could be us and so that's why we have Brenda here with us today and she's an expert on safe living so please help me welcome Brenda Scott Brenda how are you today great thank you for having me so what are some of the critical things that we need to pay attention to inside a home where we have parents or relatives or clients that are trying to age in place and we need to help keep them safe definitely security starting at the front door do they have a way of knowing who's

at the door without having to go to the door like technology is really awesome right now especially if they're a little techsavvy they might have it on their cell phone or they might have you know that doorbell camera thing they can see who's there there's a lot of problems with door-to-door scammers and seniors seem to be their Target so if they can answer the door without going to the door and knowing who's there and just telling them to go away or you know leave it at the door and I'll get it

later because that's sometimes how they do is once you open the door they come in if you can start at the front door by giving them some kind of security as to knowing how to answer the door safely that's the first step and then definitely looking at their floors making sure that there's nothing that's going to trip them do they have what they need is it starting to pile up do they need some help with you know taking the garbage out and that kind of stuff do they need a bin there or are they ju

st throwing it in the corner and it's going to trip them do they need some help with doing the dishes is it starting to pile up or even look at the condition of their dishes I know some of our senior clients use stuff that is damaged because it's not damaged enough to throw away you know so I always encourage family members and even cleaners or organizers to look at what the clients are using and encourage them to not use substandard stuff if you've got some nice plates and cups why are you usin

g the icky stuff Stu it's going to bust and it's going to bust in your hands or when you've got something hot in it so look at replacing all the stuff that's showing its age and get them the nice stuff and I'm really glad that you brought that up to remind you guys and to highlight what Brenda just said because a lot of times we do slip over this and I've seen this so many times expired Tupperware and not just Tupperware but plastic containers where sometimes they've gone from the freezer to the

microwave freezer to the microwave or they've fallen out of the freezer and they hit the floor and they break and they crack and then they're being used again and again and again and stuff is leaking out but you don't really know why and it's not apparent that that's why it's leaking out and so if you have older containers please inspect them for chips and cracks and holes and breakage so that you don't have stuff that's leaking because the leaking stuff is what you slip on and you don't unders

tand that that you slipped on it because it leaked out of the broken container that you have also the chips and cracks what Brenda is talking about on your dishes on the rim of the dishes it's super easy to crack plates or to chip plates and bowls and stuff and then you hold them and they cut you and you don't really think that's going to happen but it does and many times and I want to just pay attention to this because it's easy When We're Young we get cut and we heal immediately when you are a

senior it's not so immediate and sometimes the skin is much thinner than it is when you're young and so you cut yourself and then you don't heal very well and so there are a series of seniors that I've had the privilege of working with that they're always cut up and they're bruised and you're like oh my goodness what's happened now and they're like I just touched something and I started bleeding okay so we have to be super careful about breakage on any item if we have chipped items and it could

be picture frames it could be anything that you pick up if there's anything that you use on a regular basis if it's cracked chipped broken it needs to be discarded not fixed because if you just fix it it's easy to break again there's a lot of stuff out there that can be replaced very inexpensively and a lot of it for free if you use an app like next.com someone can give you a replacement that's not broken and not only that but there's a lot of pretty stuff that's available now that's even light

er weight so instead of having like those great big Corning wear plates that are really heavy I know that even as my mother had gone through and she's one of the people that fell and busted up her whole body in the process of that she's got one hand on a stabilizer which is like a little Walker stabilizer and the other hand trying to carry this big heavy Corning wear plate and so they do make a lighter weight version it's a very lightweight dish that you can put your food on and it supports you

it let you be independent that much longer and so little tiny things like that that would be super helpful just to pay attention to for your parents or I don't know your clients or maybe it's you thank you so much for today this was really awesome and I appreciate you guys jumping in and adding your questions and joining the conversation so thank you until we see you again take care and please leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it