We Want You To Feel Safe and Comfortable with the Home Project Process During This Pandemic
The health and safety of our clients and employees has always been paramount at Innovative Design + Build. Maintaining clean, neat and safe job sites in a thorough and systematic way has always been a crucial part of all of our projects. We are taking the pandemic very seriously, especially because a lot of our clients are in the at-risk category. But while we’ve had to make some adjustments due to COVID-19, the health and safety precautions we’ve already been practicing made it an easy transition for us. What follows are what to expect in regards to your health and safety during construction.
Virtual and Outdoor Meetings
We are minimizing the number of face-to-face meetings required on our jobsites. Accordingly, our office has gone 100% virtual and we will meet with you via Zoom whenever possible. And when we do meet in person, we will be wearing masks and hold our meetings outdoors with safe social distancing. These meetings are limited to a minimum number of people.
Our Procedures
We have followed the EPA’s Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule (RRP Rule) standards on all of our jobs since 2014. This is part of the reason adding safety measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 was not difficult for us. Here’s a list of the precautions we take and our general process during these strange and challenging times.
1. Two Laminated Sign Locations Per Job
We post guidelines for our every worker at the entrance to every jobsite. If we are working on the interior of your home, we post a second sign inside. These include a stop sign for anyone who is exhibiting any symptoms to turn right around and go home. These signs also include The National Association of Home Builders’ COVID-19 Jobsite Safety Stand Down in both English and Spanish. We follow the processes they outline on every jobsite. In addition, anyone who shows symptoms and leaves will not be docked pay or paid time off that day.
2. Safety Entry Station
Just past the sign is a station containing masks for all tradespeople and disinfectant spray.All tradespeople are required to wear masks. To make sure of this, there is a reminder sign on the entry station and our project managers emphasize this to every worker regularly and ensure compliance. If anyone in the household has a higher risk for severe illness, we provide a thermometer and perform temperature checks.
3. Hand-washing Stations
We require frequent hand-washing and set up a hand-washing station with water and soap on every jobsite.
4. Daily Checklist
We provide a checklist of tasks for the start and end of each day. The project manager of a project designates a team member to be responsible for the daily checklist at each job. This list includes turning the air scrubber on, inspecting for and fixing any leaks, wiping down door knobs, making sure everyone has a mask, disinfecting the Port-a-Potty, outfitting the hand-washing station, inspecting air scrubber filters and inspecting signs. At the end of each day after we complete and check off all of these tasks, this team member must take a photo of the list and log it into the project management software.
5. Making Sure the Air Quality in Your Home Is Safe and Healthy
We seal each job area off with plastic walls and zipper doors. Within this space, we make sure that dust and germs in the air are filtered and leave the interior of the house clean. We do this by running a BuildClean Air Scrubber on all indoor jobs. This equipment has an HEPA filter and creates negative pressure to keep you safe from dust and germs in the air.
6. Wiping Down Door Knobs and Switches
To prevent any potential spread of germs on surfaces, our workers wipe down all door knobs and switches that anyone has touched at the end of the day. They take photos of everything they wipe down and submit them to the project management software.
7. Weekly Safety Meetings
All of our project managers have a “safety huddle” once a week to go over all of these procedures. This includes reviewing The National Association of Home Builders’ COVID-19 Jobsite Safety Stand Down packet, and answering any questions. In addition, we also go over safety precautions during our weekly client meetings.
8. Being Proactive
Everyone on the team is responsible not only for wearing their masks and abiding by the 6-foot social distancing rule, but also for pointing out if they see any violations of this rule and correcting the behavior. We’re all in this together!
If you have any questions or concerns about the safe completion of your project, please do not hesitate to let us know.