Cohousing-L Mailing List: common house

[Judy (BAXTER%EPIVAX]

By the way, it's really nice to see all this activity on the list - it makes
going to work much nicer, though can't take much time.

Nancy wight, of new view, acton,mass asks

> It sounds like you're further along than we are and I'd be really
>interested to hear your stories.  Do you actually have a common house built
>yet?                                                                      

Answer is: - not exactly built, but yes, we have common space - large kitchen,
modest size dining room with fireplace and a couple of adjacent rooms we will
probably use for overflow, as well as the large corridor.  This is all on
ground/basement level (we're on a hill) and is part of the existing building we
bought, an elegant, Georgian brick building with columns out front, large lawn,
and 2.7 acres including a wooded ravine.  It was built in 1924 as a
retirment/nursing home for Christian Scientist, actually they called it a
hospital, apparently.  

The next floor has a very large, living room with bay windows and window seats,
fireplace, entry area, etc, a cherry paneled "library" with only one built in
bookcase and a fireplace.  Those are our common spaces.  That floor also has
two small units, 2 rooms plus bathroom, plus 1 medium and 1 very small guest
room.  The uppper two floors have respectively 4 units (2 small, 2 medium) and
2 units (large).  

The layout is less than idea re "THE BOOK", and we are just now coming up to
discussions of the trade-off between moving kitchen and dining room upstairs,
to 1st floor, with view of the "courtyard-to-be" when we build 10-15 additional
townhouses, and building something on to the existing kitchen and dining room,
to the side.  Oh yes, we also have a porch on the 1st floor, and a number of
miscellaneous rooms on the lowest level that we haven't had time to decide what
to do with.  

So that's a bit about our common house.

Judy Baxter, Monterey Cohousing Community, Twin Cities Area, Mpls/St.Paul MN
        (Mococo)                baxter%epivax [at] vx.acs.umn.edu