Cohousing-L Mailing List: workshop (was How are your great room ...)

[Kay Argyle (kay.argyle]

> ... does your group have a workshop? Do you wish that you had one? I want
> one badly, because where else will we put the table saw and drill press?
But
> maybe communities that have them don't use them? How do you deal with
> insurance issues? 

You may safely assume that, whatever interests and hobbies the group members
during planning have, later residents will have different interests.  Build
flexibility into your common spaces.

In the common house, we have a "clean crafts" room, with several donated
sewing machines.  A "messy crafts" room (pottery, painting) was planned but
never outfitted, and gets used for badly needed storage.

In a separate building we have a woodworking shop and a garage (with garage
door).  I have no idea if our insurance coverage makes note of them or not.

The shop sat empty for the first couple of years after move-in. I don't know
if whoever had advocated for its existence during planning had dropped out
of the group, or what the reason was.  Finally two new households, with shop
equipment of their own, moved in and were interested in having someplace to
keep and use it, so they set things up and did stuff like install shelving,
finish the bathroom, and put security grates over the windows.

Most residents use the workshop little if at all. Some use it sporadically.
Several people use it a lot. All the shop equipment is privately owned, and
permission must be obtained to use it.  Small tools are mostly kept locked
up in personal cabinets.

Welding is not a good idea someplace you have fine (highly flammable) wood
dust.  The welding equipment is therefore in the garage - which of course
has gas-powered equipment stored in it.  Before any work can be done, all
potential sources of gas fumes have to be dragged outside, and the garage
well-aired.

A couple of people use the garage occasionally to work on their vehicles,
but first they have to make enough space.  Which brings us back to storage.

We don't have a garden shed, so all of the equipment has to be kept in the
garage -racks of shovels, rakes, pickaxes, sledgehammers, and snowshovels,
cupboards of irrigation and plumbing parts, a couple of power lawn mowers, a
push mower, wheelbarrows, a fertilizer/sand spreader, a tiller, a
blower/leaf-vac, an edger, chain saws, assorted ladders ...  Some people put
their hoses and tomato cages in there during the winter (others leave them
out in the snow, typically in the middle of the garden paths - not a good
solution either).

The rule for garden equipment is, if it is there, you can borrow it.  So far
everyone has had the sense to leave the tiller alone (potentially the most
dangerous item, the chain saws rarely being functional) if they weren't
familiar with its use or didn't have someone available to supervise.  People
tend to think they know how to use mowers, so those have occasionally gotten
some serious abuse, luckily so far with no damage except to the machines
(from long experience, the landscaping committee budgets several hundred for
repairs every year).

Unless you have no land and thus no need for equipment, plan landscaping
equipment storage, either in a common building or at each house.  Remind
your architect that (as applicable to your development model),

(a) you aren't a "normal" condo and won't be hiring a lawn-care company to
do everything for you (unless of course that is what you plan), so you need
to own all that equipment yourselves and need someplace to keep it, or 

(b) you aren't a "normal" suburban neighborhood with attached garages, so
you need substitute storage for what would normally go in a garage, such as
a large closet on each house that opens outside.

Until we got the storage closets under the carports finished, there were
about twenty bikes in the garage as well. Cohousers tend to ride bikes more
than normal people.  Plan bike storage.

If painting exteriors is a community responsibility, as for a condo, plan
storage for paint, room for several five gallon buckets and a dozen gallon
cans. Paint is flammable, and freezing curdles it.  You need a room that is
heated in winter but has no ignition source (in other words, not a furnace
room). Plan storage for other maintenance stuff as well, like spare roof
shingles and sprinkler parts.

The safety issues relating to a workshop bring us to the subject of keys.

Originally all our common areas were on the same key.  Concerns about
safety, confidentiality, and security (like finding porn on the common house
computer!), led to rekeying.  We now have four common area keys.

(1) The common house interior (still the original key). The interior doors
are mostly left unlocked.  When the exercise room was in the common house
instead of upstairs in the workshop, it was kept locked.  Many residents
have misplaced their copy of this key, and often new residents never got it
passed along to them.

Keying the guest rooms separately has been advocated, but some people were
opposed (the guest rooms do have door chains).  

(2) The common house entrances. Older teens may borrow an entrance key, so
they can, for instance, watch videos in the sitting room.  They get their
own key if they join a monthly work team - adult responsibilities, adult
privileges. 

(3) The office and workshop.  These two were keyed alike in an attempt to
hold down the number of keys. The idea was that only adults would have
access to either.  

Older teens may borrow a key if they need to use the office computer for
homework.  One teen who used a room upstairs in the workshop as a band
practice room was allowed to borrow the key - on his honor to go straight
through the room and upstairs, and make sure his friends did the same.  

New residents don't always receive this key either.

(4) The office storage room. Only a handful of people, mostly Management
Committee, have the key. Kept there are the community's legal records,
personal financial records for the income-qualified units, and a box with
keys to most units, officially for emergencies, most of which consist of
someone locking themselves out of their house. 

The room also has the sprinkler control boxes, installed there before the
restricted access was decided upon, so the "water master" has to have a key
also.

Kay
Wasatch Commons
SLC