3 Practical Tips on Organizing Your Home for Your Senior Loved One

It’s painful for one to see their elderly loved one struggling with furniture and appliances in the home for simple day-to-day actions like eating, bathing, dressing up and taking medicines. The arrangement of various things in the house may be convenient for the whole family, but it may not be necessarily convenient for a senior family member. With a little creativity and organization, you can make it so. Here are a few tips that can make life easy for your elderly loved one.

1. Kitchen, Pantry and Refrigerator

You can anytime take help of an excellent company like Empowered Homecare Services; but you can even do certain things on your own for your senior family member.

Age brings many health issues. It’s necessary for seniors to eat well in order to increase immunity to fight illnesses and build strength. In this regard, a well-organized kitchen, pantry and refrigerator have an important place in the routine of a senior. If these places are full of spoiled or unpalatable leftovers and expired packages, you should take an immediate action and organize them.

It’s obvious that you should at once trash away any rotten and expired foods. But it’s also necessary to arrange things in such a way that the mess will be minimized even in the future. Keep ample of trash bags and cans near the fridge and pantry which your loved one can easily find to trash away spoiled and expired foods. Also keep a big magnifying glass handy for them to check expiry dates on packets.

Another thing you can keep handy is a box of wet wipes and napkins. If your loved one has enough mobility, they can clean the racks in the fridge and pantry, and even cabinets. If they have lost their mobility, you’ll have to regularly clean these places.

Make sure you keep only unbreakable cutlery in your kitchen to avoid any injury caused by broken pieces, and it should be easily accessible to your loved one.

2. Medicine Cabinet

Taking medicines regularly is very important for seniors. But they can miss their doses simply because of loss of vision even though they have not run into dementia or Alzheimer’s. You can help them take their medicines more regularly by organizing their medicine cabinet.

Firstly their medicine cabinet should not be too high or too low. All their medicines should be kept at a level accessible to them. Keep each type of medicine in separate boxes. Decide a label for each kind of medicine as per their convenience, e.g. type of disease or the brand name, and label the boxes in big letters. Make sure you also mention the dosage and timing to take the medicine on the label. Here too place a big magnifying glass handy.

Such an organization is even helpful to a caregiver from a firm like Empowered Homecare Services if you appoint one so that they can take care of your loved one more efficiently.

3. Closet

Even while organizing closets for your elderly loved one, you can make use of labels and a magnifying glass to read those labels, even though you should write the labels in big letters. Classify the clothes according to the type of cloth, type of fashion, season, etc. so that your loved one can easily find clothes suitable to their mood and season. Here you can create hanging labels and hang them on the hangers of the respective clothes. Hang dressy clothes on rods and place warm clothes in baskets.

While organizing accessories, choose a board instead of boxes. Hang or stick this board on the inside of the closet or any other place which is convenient for your loved one. Hang necklaces, earrings, rings etc. on this board so that your loved one won’t need to dig through a pile of them to find their desired ones.

Make a separate compartment or drawer for purses and clutches, and keep a gap between each two of them so that your loved one won’t face a difficulty in finding their desired one.

In addition to this, make sure you place the furniture in your home out of the way. Avoid keeping sharp, protruding objects at the eye level.

It’s your duty to make the life of your aged loved one as easy and comfortable as possible, and it can be done in many ways. Organizing your home is one of them. Do it and enjoy the happiness in your loved one’s eyes.