Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: [Fwd: Common house cleaning schedule]

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

This will be an interesting example of the difference in people. Some folks
want things very clean, others will have lesser standards.  One way to look
at this is to decide tasks and frequency. For example, how often will you
wash the windows?  How about cleaning under the scullery? I would advice you
to give this ownership to a team rather than a large group process. 

At Sharingwood we have a team that decides things about the commonhouse and
every adult and child over 16 is charged $5 a month for commonhouse
cleaning. There is a commonhouse cleaning taskmaster who sets up the monthly
cleaning schedule and sets the tasks for each month, which are printed on a
list which the monthly cleaning team checks off when they do them. If you do
not want to clean the commonhouse your $5 a month is used to pay someone
else $20 an hour to do your 3 hours of annual cleaning. If you do your
cleaning, the money is refunded to you.  So basically everybody does three
hours of commonhouse cleaning a year, or pays someone else to do that for
them.  We take out the money proactively to make it easier, rather than try
to collect. 

We have had this system in place for 4 or 5 years now and it seems to be
working as the work gets done and nobody is complaining.  One thing is that
the team for the month sometimes does it all together on one day and has a
fun cleaning party, or people just come in and do three hours of tasks and
mark them off whenever. It has to be done in the second half of the month.
And the commonhouse team monitors the work, adds things to the list that
need doing, etc.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood 
Snohomish County, WA