Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Kids and the Common House

[Casey Morrigan (cjmorr]

Here are some things I've learned from living in our common house and using
the kid's room.

It's great to have a room for younger kids that has line-of-sight connection
with the multipurpose/dining room.  That way parents can eat and watch their
youngsters through the tempered glass window/door at the same time. The
kid's space outside is out of line of sight for parents on the plaza and
thus is not at all practical nor often used.

Lots of storage for toys and dress-up at level where kids can access them
independently and put them away easily, and lots of other storage for crafts
stuff that you'd want to come out during adult supervision. You can do this
after construction with shelving like from IKEA, which is what we did.

Younger and older love the loft we put in. Our dark, industrial strength
carpet is great and doesn't show wear or dirt.

Finally, our kids room is too small for the number of kids we have (9 kids,
most 6-9 years) and we should have allocated less to the laundry and more to
the kids.







> -----Original Message-----
> From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
> [mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of Randy Sailer
> Sent: Monday, May 19, 2003 7:28 PM
> To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> Subject: [C-L]_Kids and the Common House
>
>
>
> We are about to start designing our common house and I wanted to get
> some thoughts/advice on how to include the children of the
> community in
> the process. There were relatively children in the community
> during the
> site design and through much of of the unit design, but as we
> have been
> filling up, we have many more children (like over 20 now).
>
> My 6 year old son is very excited about the common house (I
> am not sure
> that it can look like a castle, though) and I bet other kids are as
> well. I especially think that some of the teenagers and
> pre-teens might
> be interested in thinking about their own space needs.
>
> Our architect is willing and eager to work with the kids and
> we have a
> kindergarten teacher and an art therapist that are also into it. Any
> suggestions as to a fun process? Any advice? Any watch fors?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Randy
>
> Rocky Hill Cohousing
> Northampton, MA
>
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