Five Main Steps for Prepping Your Home for Baby’s Arrival
Bringing your newborn home is a very exciting experience and a blessing. You’re entering a new chapter of your life, and you’ve prepared hard for it. However, baby’s arrival may also feel like a rollercoaster ride and bring a slew of worries, regardless of whether you became parents for the first time or have experience.
In light of this, you may seek advice from other caregivers, your family, or online resources. Whether you’ll follow in your parent’s footsteps or take a different approach is up to you. In fact, 43% of today’s parents admit raising their kids in a similar manner to that of their parents, with the percentage of those taking a different stance growing by 1%.
With this in mind, you may find it challenging to decide what aspects of the home preparation stage require more attention. This guide will walk you through the five most important steps before the baby’s arrival.
Prepare your kitchen
From the moment your baby enters the door, your kitchen will become one of the rooms with the most traffic. You’ll make baby bottles several times daily and clean them more often than before their arrival.
During their first months, making changes in the kitchen will be off the table, meaning that you’ll wish you had created a baby-friendly kitchen before you brought them home.
This is why you should carefully inspect your kitchen furniture to ensure it’s in good condition and doesn’t pose any accidents or health risks. The last thing you want is to deal with broken hinges and improperly assembled joints.
Additionally, you should ensure your cabinetry is quality, water-resistant, doesn’t swell, and enables the storage you need for your baby’s products. Because your cooking room will be exposed to plenty of humidity from washing dishes and cooking, as well as water splashed everywhere since you’ll be multi-tasking in a hurry, you want to make sure it resists wear and tear and prevents mold from growing.
Developed mold spreads quickly and poses health risks, but by taking proper preventative measures, you won’t have to stress about these problems. And if you happen to find mold already developed on your kitchen doors, you must eliminate it.
If a complete renovation exceeds your budget, you can opt for replacement kitchen doors. At Kitchen Warehouse LTD, you can find a vast selection of products to suit your needs, whether you go for a complete overhaul or replace damaged cabinet doors.
Take tips for preparing the nursery
Getting the nursery ready for the baby’s arrival is one of the most delightful times for every parent. You’ll remember this period as one of the most rewarding. The related activities enable you to enjoy your newborn’s arrival before they’re actually home.
You probably expected to deal with “uncontrollable variables” throughout the journey and after the baby’s birth. Planning the nursery gives you more control and lets you visualize how it will be when they arrive home.
If this stage feels daunting at times and you find it overwhelming to progress through each step, it is okay. In fact, it becomes significantly harder if you face time constraints, needs to do it on a budget, deal with product availability, or have difficulty deciding between options.
Many parents get lost in the world of nursery preparation, but if you consider the following tips, you’ll have a background on which to develop your project.
- Develop a strategy for managing clothes. With newborns, the only certain thing is that you shouldn’t underestimate the pace at which they grow and how quickly they outgrow their clothes and burp cloths. With a clothing strategy in place, you’ll be prepared beforehand. The best thing to do is save the clothes your baby has yet to wear in a separate drawer and ensure you don’t waste time stumbling upon those garments you’re not using anytime soon.
- Set a focal point. This will be a reference point when buying furniture and other products for your baby’s room. It will ensure you won’t enter the overspending mode and purchase stuff that doesn’t mix and match with other parts of the room or useless things you won’t use.
- Consider the chosen style. The designs and style chosen help design, create focus and add a touch of personality to your newborn’s room.
Free up space in other rooms
Large newborn items like bassinets, rocking chairs, and changing pads can easily clog your space and make it hard for you to manage cleaning and other tasks. When you start living with your baby, any decluttered spot will feel like a godsend.
This is why it’s best to pay attention to freeing up the space in your home, cleaning it well, and getting rid of items that no longer serve any purpose.
You’ll thank yourself for organizing the rooms before your bundle of joy arrives. And since you’re rearranging and decluttering your home, you should also create spaces designed for specific purposes. Set up stations for sleeping, changing, and feeding your baby, and add the items needed so you won’t transit rooms relentlessly.
Stock your freezer
Keeping your eyes peeled for your baby can be energy-consuming, especially at the beginning. This is why you must stay healthy and eat well to take care of your child in the best way possible.
Because you’ll deal with sleep deprivation and other responsibilities that may leave you with little time to prepare meals, clean the kitchen, and shop for groceries, frozen food will come in handy.
Babyproof your house
Even though there are more stages, you’ll go through until you see your baby crawl, this doesn’t mean your home is already babyproof. During the pregnancy, you should work on creating a safe dwelling for your baby that will be prepared for when they start walking around.
Cabinet locks, baby gates, mounted furniture, and safety latches are among the items that must be on your checklist.
Welcoming your newborn is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There are more things to consider when preparing the home for its arrival, but the ones presented above are the most common and noteworthy undertakings needed to make your dwelling baby-friendly.