Keep Your Family Safe: Four Essential Hurricane Prep Tips for First-Time Homeowners

Never prepared for a hurricane before as a homeowner? Worried about your family?

Don’t freak out.

While you certainly have cause for worry, prepping your home is probably easier than you’ve been led to believe. Whether you’ve realized that your first home is indeed in a hurricane-heavy area or somewhere that’s prone to flooding, it’s crucial to understand how to prepare your home for the sake of your family and your house itself.

Whether you’ve realized that you’ve moved to a hurricane heavy area or somewhere prone to flooding, it’s crucial to understand how to prepare for the sake of your family and your home’s safety.

So, what can you do to provide yourself peace of mind during a hurricane beyond your home insurance policy?

Take Care of Your Outdoor Clutter

First thing’s first: you need to lock down anything and everything outside that could potentially fly into your home during a hurricane. When you’re dealing with wind speeds of approximately 100 miles per hour, even the smallest piece of clutter could smash a window or cause major damage to a vehicle left at home.

Ideally, you can move all of your exterior junk and outdoor décor into a metal building home or steel shed that can take a beating. Either way, the more you have indoors and out of your yard, the better.

Prioritize Your Windows

As noted, your windows are at the most risk of causing damage from letting rain and debris into your home to causing a potential safety hazard due to glass shards. Many modern homes in hurricane-prone states such as Florida are built with hurricane shutters or spots where such shutters can easily be installed. If you don’t have shutters, you can always reinforce your windows with plywood the old-fashioned way.

The jury’s still out on whether or not taping your windows is a good idea. When in doubt, shutters or plywood are probably your best bet if you’re dealing with anything beyond a tropical depression and debris might be flying around.

Keep Your Home Free of Flooding

Sandbags are your friend when it comes to preventing water entering your home. It pays to purchase such as items in advance from a hardware store as they’re often the first to go when locals get the sense that a hurricane is on the way. If not, there’s also flood-specific tape you can use to border your doorways which can be purchased from the likes of Amazon; however, such a solution is much costlier than traditional sandbags.

You can assess whether your home is likely to flood by checking out your county’s website by Googling “(Country name) + flood zone.” If water reaches your doorway during heavy rain outside of hurricane season, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Take Everything Off the Wall

Any and all décor that could potentially come off the walls needs to come down before the storm, especially if you’re riding it out. Since tornadoes regularly form during hurricanes, you’ll thank yourself down the line for preemptively removing items from the wall. This is especially true if you decide to ride out the storm.

Don’t panic because you live in an area where hurricanes form. If you live relatively inland and dozens of miles away from a coastal region, you can generally protect your home with these basic tips barring extreme circumstances.

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