Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Guest Room Usage and Policies in Cohousing

[Kay Argyle (argyle]

Response for Wasatch Commons, Salt Lake City.

> 1) Are they overbooked on major holidays?

Not so far.

> 2) How do you decide who gets to use the guest rooms?

According to the proposal we passed the fall after the common house was
finished (1999), each household gets seven days free annually, and any use
beyond that carries a fee.  Our resident lawyer-types are uneasy about the
legality of charging, but in case I don't think anyone has used up their
seven free days.  Holiday reservation conflicts are to be negotiated;
otherwise reservations are first-come first-served.

> 3) How are they cleaned/maintained?

Vacuumed by the monthly work teams; the host is responsible for making sure
the room and linens are cleaned after their guest leaves.

> 4) What are your guest policies?

A guest has to have a host, but we haven't made any rules about what the
relationship has to be.  We just hosted a bunch of college students doing a
"volunteer spring break" for a resident who runs a nonprofit.  They were
supposed to do some "environmentally related" work in return for free
housing, but missed the work party when their van got sideswiped en route
(we gave their host a bad time -- there never were any college students,
right?  This was all a scam to get us to hold a work party landscaping the
east entrance).

> 5) Would you have built more/fewer guest rooms if you had it to do over?

We're getting along with one.  I'd design some of the other parts of the
common house better so we wouldn't be eyeing the guest rooms for other uses.
As it is, the common house was designed with two, but one got turned into an
exercise room when the space designed for that proved unsatisfactory, and
we're talking about setting up the other as an auxiliary sitting
room/meeting space with an inflatable mattress for guests.

> 6) Has having guests had a positive or a negative impact on your
community?
> Why?
> --Diane Simpson

Family members, not much impact either way.  We've had a couple of traveling
cohousers who were able to give us an outside yet cohousing-informed view on
how we do things, which has been a positive influence.

Kay Argyle

_______________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list
Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org  Unsubscribe info:
http://www.communityforum.net/mailman/listinfo/cohousing-l