Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: managing the common house

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

There are location aspects for how your commonhouse is likely to be managed.
For example if you are urban, then theft is probably a big issue. At
Sharingwood, we are at the end of a country road and we could not lock our
commonhouse if wanted to because we don't have locks on our commonhouse. In
the country we walk around in total darkness all the time (well actually
only at night) with the biggest fear being that you might walk into a tree.


Kids are one of the main users of our commonhouse. They are sometimes in
need of reminding of how to be better stewards, but they often clean up
after each other pretty well, and when they need reminding they take care of
it, usually right away, since they know it's a privilege to have free use of
the space.  

We have a pantry system for food, some of which involves the fridge which
involves signing out for the pantry items you use. Leftovers from dinners
are free after 24 hours. Sometimes people drop off stuff at the commonhouse
and put a note on it for people to eat or take home. They other day there
was a big pan of yummy apple crisp out and the dispersal of that treat
reminded my of how a bee hive operates, one kid walks past with a napkin of
apple crisp and that advertises it to others. "Hey, where didja get that?"

There are a couple people who live without electricity in my community and
they have shelves with their private stuff on it in the commonhouse frig.
Both of which encourage people to borrow from their food if you need an egg
or something. 

Our heating and cooling is set on a thermostat timer. If you turn it up it
automatically returns to the normal setting after some time period which I
can't recall. 

Members can use the commonhouse for private events but there is a small
rental fee. Non member usage is not something we do at this time.  Member
events that are open to the community are free.  Because we are in the
country, we have few outside users for our building, but we do host some
neat member stuff from time to time.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood Community
Snohomish County WA
Where I got  woken up three times last night by a Barred Owl outside my
window