Recently my wife and I undertook the task of renovating our kitchen. To keep the costs down I tried to do a lot of the work myself and hired out the specialty jobs. For this blog instead of focusing on Prime Contractor legislation, or Occupational Health and Safety, I want to spend some time on how we look at safety in the workplace compared to safety in the home.
As a safety trainer I spend a lot of my day making sure that the groups that I am working with are prepared to work safely. We perform a site inspection, secure the area where we will be operating equipment and many other tasks before we start training. As a group we perform hazard assessments to make sure we are aware of any dangers in our workplace. Cut to my home project where I am installing the steal shelving for our pantry shelves – I carefully navigate into my garage, ducking under and over drying baseboard trim to grab the angle grinder and zip off a half inch of tracking to make it fit… Did I move the drying trim to create a safe workspace? Did I grab my safety glasses (they were back in the house of course)? Did I have gloves on? Why is safety a second thought when at home? Time. I had 2 hours to complete this task before I had to pick up my kids. Without sounding doom and gloom, what would have happened if I would have lost an eye; or tripped and knocked over every piece of trim? Time does this to us. Working efficiently doesn’t have to mean rushing, and working safely doesn’t have to mean working slowly. Yet, this is the perception we give ourselves. That safety means a slowdown in productivity.
It is easy to look back and say, ‘whew, got away with that’. Instead, let’s look proactively at creating workspaces in our home to ensure that we work safely when in our backyard or our garage.
- In the shed, place a pair of safety glasses, closed toe shoes and gloves adjacent to the lawnmower and string trimmer, so that you can easily access the bare minimum to protect yourself.
- In the garage, hang a face shield by the air compressor so that when you go to turn it on, the safety gear you need is right there.
Plan your day like you would at work. If you are working on a large project, think about the tasks you want to get done in the day and organize yourself properly to make sure the work can flow.
For my example above, I should have cut the shelves way ahead of painting the trim, had I really thought things through – cutting the shelves created dust and metal shavings that almost ruined the paint. Had I done a proper evaluation of my day and what I wanted to accomplish I would have decided to make sure the airline was routed outside of the garage in order to safely cut the shelves. This would have also negated the challenge of forgetting my safety glasses, as I could have simply walked back inside. Time was my enemy, but it doesn’t need to be that way. Make time part of the plan and organize your day; properly organize your safety at home.