I’m Greg Smith along with Margaret Williams and right now we enter into this week in Home Services that’s where we talk about different things on the home services industry and right now we bring in from a company called Cornerstone Inspection property inspection John Anderson. John welcome to the program today how are you good Greg thanks for having me alright great to have you now John tell us who you are what you do where you’re located and a bit about Cornerstone Inspection.

Well, I run a proper inspection franchise Cornerstone Inspection just outside the Atlanta area in Georgia We’re a full-service property inspection company providing real estate inspections for pre-purchased pre-listing real estate transactions. Alright very good and today we’re going to talk about child safety issues in the home and let’s start with drowning this is always a problem when you have kids around the house you don’t even have to have a pool for this to be the case so let’s start with this topic John yeah one of the biggest things is a is buckets it’s something you know we we generally check for during inspections but it’s something people as home owners a lot of listeners are gonna wanna go around the house and check five-gallon buckets they can hold a lot of water if you have toddlers, like I do, I have three little girl so it is you know it’s a very near and dear subject to make toddlers could be walking around they are very curious they could fall into the bucket head first and they will be able to get backout so I if you’ve ever seen the movie ray with Ray Charles the beginning of the movie starts out and that happens to his brother He falls into a bucket and he can’t get back out so buckets is definitely something you want to check for around the house you don’t want to have even if they are empty you just wanna wanna put them out of reach of kids.

Alright you got three daughters what whatever age ranges right now 7, 5 and 1 and the 1 is the troublemaker okay are you saving up for those wedding funds coming down the road yeah near 15 years or so Yeah I need to be alright so support John Anderson in Georgia with Cornerstone Inspection he’s got a lot of spending to do down the line here okay now let’s move on to another topic here for child safety sinks, bathtubs and toilets yeah again it comes back to drowning. Drowning is the number two cause of infant deaths behind motor vehicle accident and there’s a story that we were told about you know the family goes stays overnight at somebody’s house they don’t have a crib or pack and play so they put the kids in the tub and the tub the kid wakes up in the middle of the night curious with the faucets turns on the water and you can’t figure what happens next you know that the blanket clogs up the drain and the kid drowns so unless you’re an adult and you know we’ve all probably slept in the tub you know back in the day or whatever but the well yeah let’s not get into those days so yes you want to keep your kids away from the tub, yeah and I think the idea here is just around water any type a sort even you can only talk about pools you need to have the fences even five-gallon buckets you have to watch and tubs you say well you know we didn’t turn the water on well they might so its water that we’re talking around here right now. John Anderson is with us he is a Cornerstone Inspection franchisee out of Georgia here near the Atlanta area correct John yes yup just outside Atlanta area.

Let’s move on to pools spas and fountains up one the biggest things we check for in pools. We have a ton of pools up here in the Southeast but but a lot of people do have them we checked for a lot of the barriers going into to around the pool. The biggest thing one being pet doors some people have pet doors going out onto the deck which leads to the pool obviously you can see a kid going through the pet door. So if you have a pet door you wanna make sure it’s lockable you wanna make sure you have a lock on it. Something else we check is actually basically an alarm on the doors so when the door opens it sounds the alarm so if you know if your kid open the doors going out on the deck you’re going to hear that alarm The barriers around the pool too as for the fencing every pool should be fenced in with child-safety locks so I mean that’s that’s something we write up during a home inspection as well right and the one thing here is that there’s nothing like the adult supervision with the every safeguard in place there’s still an opportunity for an unfortunate circumstance so just parents watching and most parents of course are real good about this right John yeah yeah exactly I mean that’s something that a lot of the stuff is it a lot of common sense stuff in it does come back to you really just gotta pay attention to your kids but just in case you know a couple minutes they are out of your sight and I know how it happens how easily it does that’s why these provisions need to be in place okay now garage doors. This has nothing to do with water but it’s an important aspect when it comes to child safety around the home.

Right, it’s a crushing hazard I mean when we do the home inspections we check for two safety provisions one being the beam detectors and most of the new garage door openers have these if you’re at home now you can go or when you get home your homework go see if you have beam detectors on either side of the rails for the garage door should be two little boxes basically when the garage doors coming down I I just stick my foot in front of it and the garage door should reverse They should be in place. . . some of the older garage door openers don’t have them but you can get like a retrofit kit and you can add that onto them the other one we check the garage door openers for is the resistance test so if it’s coming down you know I’ll put my arms in front of it or you can put a block of wood in front of it when it comes down and hits something, it should reverse it’s based on a tension screw so if it goes down and keeps on going down you can adjust that pretty easily with a little common screwdriver but those are the two tests we check the garage door opener for it’s just a crushing hazard for children. Okay, let’s move on to guards and handrails why would this be something that we should worry about guardrails and handrails as far as child safety is concerned Fall hazard.

Up until somewhat recently a lot of times there have been gaps in the handrails that are bigger than four-inches. Four inches is the current standard you don’t want to have anything more than with something you can pass 4-inch spears through the opening which is basically the size of a toddler’s head, the size of your fist. They could fall through so I mean if you have something a lot of the older homes were built with the handrails and they had a bigger gap you could put a piece of plexiglass a piece of mesh piece of and netting of some sort to bring that up to current standards okay John Anderson with us from the Cornerstone Inspection franchise out near Atlanta Georgia and a Cornerstone Inspection their website inspect dash kit the number one and then ASCII dot com inspected first dot com they have franchises all over the United States you can look on their website and find where there may be a franchise near you and if somebody is thinking about having and Cornerstone Inspection representative come out what’s the process involved in working with someone from Cornerstone InspectionJohn. Generally, they put a house under a contractor house or a commercial property of some sort under contract, and then they have a due diligence period which is typically a week or two. I think it’s 10 to 12 days out by me and then they basically want to make sure they’re not buying the money pitThey want to make sure that there’s you know nothing that they missed during their initial walkthrough and if there is they want to figure out what it is and you know and make sure that they’re still okay with buying that property so then they call us up in we come out and do a home inspection Generally two three four hours depending on how big the houses and how old the house is and then we produce a report and then the buyer can make a much more educated decision about whether or not they’re gonna purchase the house and for what cost what is the cost range of a Cornerstone Inspection inspection I know that that varies from the size of the home but what in general can people expect to pay our car prices for single-family home start around 350 and go up from there again depending on you know how many bedrooms and bathrooms and how old the house is.

Generally, houses that are older take a lot longer to inspect. we find a lot more issues with those things so but I would say 350 to 450 and then there’s other services the people may elect to get such as termite inspection or radon test. Radon is pretty prevalent out this way too so we end up doing a lot a radon tests as well.

John Anderson is with us right now he is from the Cornerstone Inspectionfranchise system and now we are going to continue with our discussion on child safety and get away from maybe the nuts and bolts of things and into some other things that you have to think about including poisoning. John how do you work to prevent especially in a home inspection the possibility of child poisonings. The biggest thing would be again setting up barriers a lot of people end up getting the cabinet latches to keep kids from getting into poison the easiest thing is to put them out of reach somehow but there’s different things you put on the cabinet you can put handles protective handles on the doorknobs where you’re gonna keep that sort of stuff but keeping things out of reach one way or another is is the best way to do that okay and also keeping that phone number for the poison control center and having it easily accessible on the refrigerator or something a lot of people do that and that’s important too let’s move on to carbon monoxide poisoning that kills about 300 people each year in the US what does that have to do with child safety in the home well carbon monoxide is a byproduct of anything you’re burning any fuel that you are burning and you breathe enough of it in you faint, you get headaches you could throw up I mean eventually you could die. I’m sure everyone’s heard of carbon monoxide poisoning you know people in a garage but the way to prevent that is really easy buying a carbon monoxide detector current standards generally call for one per home and you want to put it somewhere where you can hear it but at the same time it’s close to whatever in your home is producing the carbon monoxide which would be your furnace or heater of some sort.

We have an oil furnace where I’m at a lot of people have gas furnaces around here so generally we look for them at the top of the basement stairs and you could be’s just as easily as having aa battery car monoxide detector similar to a smoke detector and you want to test it similar to a smoke detector and change the batteries twice a year so the easy way to do that is put a carbon monoxide detector in the home one thing that I do too is I once and a while I find myself pulling the grill into the garage on a rainy day and grilling and that’s a no no and any time you’re grilling you wanna keep that combustible you know up fuel outside so the chance for Carbon Monoxide entering the home is you know you can’t do that so.

John you also brought up smoke detectors this is like the CO detectors an important thing to have in the house but let’s touch on smoke detectors it’s different for every municipality generally we look for one per bedroom as well as one per floor. Some municipalities will call out them to be hardwired we look for at least the battery-powered ones and again you should check those you know once a month you should change out the batteries a couple of times a year and yeah but like I said every municipality a little bit different as far as what they require some of them around here just want one per floor. But yeah I mean a minimum is 1 per floor now when it comes to fire safety the family should have a plan of sorts yes exit emergency plan right yet at this point that pretty much we review our our plan heremy family every time we hear a fire truck in the neighborhood or when the girls see a fire truck that’s generally when we go over our plan but yeah I mean you wanna talk with your family want to tell him where to meet if if something happens if there’s a fire something happens you wanna say will we’ll meet out at the end of the driveway or we’ll meet over at the neighbors house you gotta tell your kids this, you gotta reinforce it with them so if something ever happens you’re not going back in the house to look for your kid to find out where they are at or they’re not running around looking for you everybody should know to go down to wherever your meeting point is and that that plan should be set in stone okay now John Anderson with us from the Cornerstone Inspection franchise bedroom window access to the outside you have to be able to get out the door of your bedroom but you also have to have a window exit but touch on that

Yeah probably the the biggest issue that we find around here at least is people finishing their basements and putting a window in the basement again most townships require that you put in another way of getting out of the basement besides stairs obviously so with what we usually see is the window well we’ll see an opening window where you know a person can get out a couple people can get out the window and then the window well will have a hatch that you can just push up and get out that way but once in a while we will see some a lot some windows with the burglar bars on them I mean that’s a definite no no if you want the burglar bars you should buy the ones where you can release them from the inside so obviously if there’s a fire and your windows are locked sure your burglars can’t get in but you can’t get out now we’re talking about child safety here and what to do when your inspecting the home making sure it is proper child safety all around another point is closets crawl spaces attics clothes dryers those small spaces that kids like to crawl into yeah I mean we don’t we don’t find too many issues with this out here but we wecheck for closet anything that we you know would close has a knob on the outside and no knob on the inside I do still find that every once in a while especially the older homes that aren’t up to current standards you can shut the closet door but that there’s nothing on the inside to help you get out and then some of the closet doors can be pretty tight so it won’t allow air to get in or out either there so that’s definitely something you want to check for at home to make sure every closet crawl spaces well sometimes will finish a basement and it butts up against a crawlspace and the door going in the crawl space again doesn’t have a latch on the inside so that’s just something you want to check if there’s a latch on the outside there should be a latch on the inside as well.

John, it’s been a pleasure, I will wrap up here with just a little bit about people might want to know about Cornerstone Inspection that we haven’t touched on yet. Yeah really quickly before we get into that I just want to give a website to the readers. the Consumer Product Safety Commission is actually really good website. I’m actually signed up for the emails if you and you can click on the sign up for the email list on the right-hand side you can get any time a recall comes up it’s reported the government any sort of safety recall you can get those emails I know my wife likes to get those as well so that something people may want to sign up for but Alright very good and one thing I want to mention is that I said there’s a dash inspect cash it personal website address there’s not it’s inspected the number one ASCII dot com inspect is the number one St dot com no dash, okay last 15 seconds is yours well thanks for having me, Greg. Again if you want to find any information on what we talked about there you can go to our website click under the About Us tab and go to white papers there’s a lot of good information our main offices put out about items like this child safety and a lot other items that consumers, homeowners, and realtors may want to know.