Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: How are your great room and kitchen connected?

[Diane (dianeclaire]

Our kitchen can be closed off and we find that very useful.    Our dining
room is very, very noisy and we have been working for ten years to try to
find ways to make it quieter.   When you design the dining room be very
careful to design one with high enough ceilings and enough sound absorbent
materials so that your dining room will be a pleasant place in which to
eat.   Trying to design ways to keep down noise in a dining room that wasn't
initially designed properly will be difficult and expensive.

Diane Margolis
Cambridge Cohousing.

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Muriel Kranowski <murielk [at] vt.edu> wrote:

>
> At 02:01 PM 3/11/2008, Kristen wrote:
> >Does your kitchen completely open to the great room/dining room? What
> works
> >or doesn't work about this?
>
> Our kitchen isn't completely open to the great room.  It's
> significantly open with two large open passthru counters and one
> small passthru space (and two doors).  The counters are very handy
> for meals serving and clean-up, and you don't feel isolated when
> you're working in the kitchen.
>
> >Are you able to completely close off the kitchen from the great
> room/dining
> >room? What works and doesn't work about this?
>
> No, we can't close off the kitchen completely, and noise from the
> kitchen can be a problem at times.  We've always planned to have some
> kind of anti-noise panels that can be placed in the passthru openings
> to completely close them off when needed, but have not settled on a
> design that would be easy to operate, durable, affordable, wouldn't
> take up too much counter space, etc.  I hope one day we'll figure it out!
>
> (Some solutions that don't look like they would involve rocket
> science evidently ARE rocket science, or are they brain
> surgery?  Anyway, harder to do than you would think.)
>
>    Muriel
>    Shadowlake Village Cohousing
>    Blacksburg, VA
>
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-- 
Diane Margolis
175 Richdale Av.
Cambridge, MA 02140
617 354 1349