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Preparing our New Home for Baby #2

When we moved into our current home last year, we had an 11 month old ready to hit the ground running (or at least very close to walking!) Since we weren't originally shopping for a new home, everything relating to closing went very quickly and before we knew it we were settled in and living here a year, expecting our second child.

You may have seen our nursery reveal from earlier this month. We are getting very excited for Pepper's arrival in a few weeks! As such (along with some of my crazy pregnancy hormones) we are making a few safety changes to our home to welcome our new baby girl.

Something I haven't said yet, is Pepper's new room is in our basement. We have a ranch style home, and although we have 3 bedrooms upstairs, we've decided our new baby will be in the basement bedroom. Our 3rd bedroom upstairs is not only our photo studio, but also we love the idea of having the two girls a floor away from each other when they are young. Lorelai was on a different floor than us at the prior house as an infant, and it not only allowed better sleep for us (because one parent could stay asleep while the other took care of the crying baby at night) but we are hoping it keeps both girls from waking each other up crying.

With this, we are doing a lot to prepare for having our new baby girl in the basement. Here are a few things we've done:

1. Purchased fire extinguishers for each floor
2. Reinforced the french doors in the basement (it is a walkout basement)
3. Added additional security cameras
4. Looking into a security system for the egress window into Pepper's room and throughout the house
5. Upgraded our internet to accommodate the additional wifi baby monitor, as we previously had very slow internet
6. Finally getting around to the radon test that we've been meaning to do!

If you haven't purchased a home lately, you may not be familiar with "radon". We had a mitigation system in our first home, and in the rush of closing on this home did not have a test done before closing. Radon is a gas that you cannot see or smell, that can leak through the foundation of your home and increases the risk of lung cancer. A radon test is the only way to find out your home's radon levels. We are embarrassed to say we have lived in our home for a year now without testing for radon, and we were excited to use Thrasher to test for the gas.

Our process was simple, the test takes a reading every hour for 48 hours. A specialist came to our home on a Tuesday morning to place the test (only about 15 minutes) and came back 2 days later to check the results. He carefully explained the results to us, as I'm always one to ask questions, I was especially impressed with how he handled my concerns. Then if there are high levels, he discusses how to mitigate high radon levels. They have detailed a PowerPoint to walk you through every step of the process.

Testing for Radon gave us huge piece of mind for the health of our family, especially considering we are in part of the country with some of the highest radon levels.


Are you concerned about radon in your home? Here are a couple things I encourage you to do!
1.  Educate yourselves with a little light reading on Thrasher's website.
2.  Use a CRM test (on sale for $75 through January)
3.  Then if you need to mitigate the radon in your home, enter the sweepstakes for a free radon mitigation system!

I was compensated with a free professional radon test to blog about my experience. All thoughts are mine!

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