Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Common House and Kitchen Housekeeping

[Claire Richards (clairerichardsrn]

We have professional cleaners come every two weeks for two hours. It
doesn’t get to everything but the major things like toilets and certain
floors.
We’ve started having flash cleans during monthly general meetings. Our
common facilities cluster comes up with a list. Then we take 10 min for
everyone to take tasks. It works very well. Folks have tried lots of other
ways to get cleaning happen and they haven’t worked.
Generally we’re working on finding ways to make the work connecting rather
than disconnecting. For many people it’s doing the work together. Then
other people prefer the work to be independent.
Best,

Claire Richards, PhD, RN (on my iPhone)


On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 7:58 AM Sharon Villines via Cohousing-L <
cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

> > On Feb 26, 2024, at 12:30 PM, Vickie Martin <vickiem5451 [at] gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I've spent the morning perusing Cohousing-L, looking for ideas on setting
> > up housekeeping cleaning schedules, and have not seen any updates since
> > 2015. There's good information there, and I would appreciate any new
> > updates and ideas.
>
> For years we had a common house cleaning crew who cleaned at 10:00 every
> other Saturday morning. It worked very well and we had a very clean common
> house. And the cleaning crew also enjoyed working together and resisted any
> suggestion of changes — like hire cleaners and encourage people to cook
> meals instead. They enjoyed cleaning and cleaning together.
>
> Then we started having workdays more regularly and some people on the
> regular cleaning crew “aged out”. The smaller crew blended with workdays,
> but workdays rarely happen more than once a month and not always every
> month. It wasn’t enough and people began noticing dirty windows, window
> sills, etc. Complaints.
>
> Twice a month cleaning of the whole common house worked fine for vacuuming
> furniture and floors, moping floors, dusting, cleaning windows, etc. But we
> also have 2-3 members who automatically straighten up any room they walk
> through during the week. And right now we don’t have a heavy population of
> messy people — 1-2 makes a big difference.
>
> On workdays, a deeper cleaning would be scheduled once a year for special
> areas or tasks — the exercise room, kitchen, workshop, basement, etc. One
> workday for decluttering drawers and closets, and inventorying kitchen
> equipment. Workdays on a regular schedule were very important to upping the
> bar on cleaning.
>
> In addition to the gardening team doing regular weeding, etc., there is a
> grounds workday, I think, twice a year. Spring and fall.
>
> Our meal teams generally clean very well after meals — your community is
> new and it does take time to get everyone on the same page in terms of
> clean enough or not clean enough.
>
> On residential dishwashers — for years I decluttered the common house 1-3
> times during the week. We had a commercial sanitizer that was run maybe
> once a week, often every two weeks. The dish return tray counter was always
> littered with glasses and odd plates that had been left around. The meal
> teams would complain about having to wash a load of left over dishes before
> they could wash the dishes from their meals. When we switched to
> residential dishwashers there were no more dishes left around. The
> dishwasher would get filled, dishes out of site, and it would be run by
> someone when it was full.
>
> I would say, however, that the kitchen floor is never clean enough and the
> Marmoleum is wearing faster than it should. Any water attracts dust and the
> dust is ground into the floor. Having a person who loves the kitchen floor
> would be wonderful — someone who takes pride in cleaning it weekly. And
> polishes it when needed.
>
> We’ve been told by people doing a circuit of visits to common houses that
> ours is the cleanest they have seen.
>
> Sharon
> ----
> Sharon Villines
> Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
> http://www.takomavillage.org
>
>
>
>
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