Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: common house dishwashers/open kitchens

[Elizabeth Stevenson (tamgoddess]

Do any of you with the dish racks that need to be lifted from below have
people who are unable to do the dishes because of a disability?

Do any of you expect to become disabled at any point?

Most of us do become disabled at some point in our lives, and wouldn't be
able to lift a heavy tray full of dishes. I think it's wise to prepare for
that, as well as the possibility that someone will join your community who
will be physically disabled.

I would not be able to pick up the dishes at your communities because of a
bad back. For me, it's no big deal because I could do something else. But
for a person whose choices about how they can work in the community are
limited, it really makes them feel useless when they can't.

We rarely have kitchen noise bothering an event in the dining room, because
when we schedule events we take that into consideration. Meals are first
priority. Our kitchen opens onto the dining and living rooms, and the cooks
can chat or even participate in a meeting if they want to, while they are
chopping veggies or doing dishes.

I have to admit, I'm completely puzzled by the people who have the kitchens
closed off, or want them to be. It seems like they have poor sound design,
rather than too noisy a kitchen. But I guess that's one of those things you
need to see to really understand.


-- 
Liz Stevenson
Southside Park Cohousing
Sacramento, California
tamgoddess [at] attbi.com
> From: "Kay Argyle" <argyle [at] mines.utah.edu>
> Reply-To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 21:13:25 -0600
> To: <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
> Subject: Re: [C-L]_common house dishwashers
> 
> I wish our kitchen was closed off from the dining room.*  A view into a
> deserted dining room doesn't make you feel less isolated than a wall of
> cupboards would, and the pass-thru isn't useful enough** to compensate for
> the noise transmission.  The utility-vs.-noise misbalance could be changed
> by cabinets underneath opening to both sides, or two-way drawers like I've
> heard one community has, plus shutters that pulled closed, to cut noise --
> vinyl accordion shutters, sliding windows, or sliding wooden doors.
> 
> (*Rather than putting the kitchen open to the dining room, I'd put it open
> to the mailroom -- that's where people are at six o'clock!)
> 
> (**It's too wide.  There's a sink counter on the kitchen side, then a
> barstool counter on the dining room side.  That might be useful for some
> sorts of entertaining, but it's all wrong for us.  It's easier/safer to
> carry a hot dish around the corner than stretch off-balance to put it on the
> upper counter.)
> 
> The Hobart dishwasher is mildly noisy, no worse than most dishwashers I've
> known (and I'd say I'm a harsh critic, I get uptight about noise), but the
> acoustics of our dining room mean you can't have noise from the kitchen if
> you've got any sort of after-dinner program.  Having to wait until 11 p.m.
> to start cleaning is the pits.
> 
> The undercounter Hobart is about the same size as a home dishwasher. It has
> a simple fold-over lip as the handle, and a plain stainless steel front.  It
> takes four racks and two people to keep up with it -- one rack being loaded,
> one rack in the machine, one rack drying/cooling, and one being unloaded and
> the dishes put away.  By the time the dishes are cool enough to handle,
> they're dry except for a few scattered drops.
> 
> Definitely, the racks are heavy when loaded -- this is why you want Corelle
> instead of stoneware.  On the other hand, since the time bottleneck is in
> unloading the racks, doing smaller loads doesn't take much longer, and we've
> found the dishes get cleaner if we load the racks lightly, anyway -- 90
> seconds isn't much time for the water to get between closely packed dishes.
> 
> Kay
> Wasatch Commons
> argyle [at] mines.utah.edu
> *:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*
> 
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