Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Common House Postal Mail

[Kay Argyle (argyle]

At Wasatch Commons, mail is delivered to locked boxes in a "mailroom" in
the common house.  The pigeon holes are long enough for a magazine (rolled)
and wide enough for a box of cds.  Larger packages are put into a big
pigeonhole, the key of which is left in the recipient's mailbox.  Packages
that won't fit into the big pigeonhole get delivered to the individual's
house.

All of our addresses are the address of the common house, plus a unit
number.  We are tightly clustered, so nobody is very far from the common
house.

There are locking doors into the mailroom from outside and from the
mailroom into the rest of the common house.  The door faces the parking lot
and isn't in sight of anybody's house, so it's a security risk -- a
would-be burglar could go into the mailroom and then have all the time in
the world with nobody watching to pick the interior lock -- not that it
would take long.  The door is glass -- break it, reach in, and turn the
latch.  The postal carrier doesn't have a key to the mailroom, so the
outside door must be unlocked before the he/she gets there in the morning.

Until the common house was finished the on-site residents were supposed to
drive to the nearest post office to pick up their mail, but after a couple
of months one member talked the carrier into delivering all the mail to a
box on her porch, and she passed it along.

Don't forget the need for "community mail" slots.  Our members have
expressed a desire to have cubbyholes big enough to keep slippers for use
in the common house or for returning a borrowed item to someone, but we are
getting by for now with a filebox of hanging folders, one for each
household, for proposal distribution, notes, payments to the dining club,
etc.

Our mailroom has a whiteboard for "urgent" notices -- upcoming work
parties, lost keys or cats, birth announcements.

Kay Argyle
Wasatch Commons
Salt Lake City