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

[mrbouchez06 (mrbouchez06]

i believe it all does qualify as  rocket surgery according to a brain 
scientist i know
 
 
In a message dated 3/11/2008 2:39:18 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
craigragland [at] gmail.com writes:


Below

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 11:18 AM, 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.
>

Songaia has a converted garage as our dining general  purpose room, with both
large and small openings to our kitchen.  (unfortunately, both openings have
a step, but a ramp is also  available).

There are two serving areas that we use routinely - an easy  one - across
counters from the cooking area and a double-line one that is  more work for
everybody, but offers faster service. There is a naturally  circular route
that one can take from the dining room, through the large  opening, through
the serving line, and back into the dining room through  the small opening.
The same route works well for handling your individual  dishes (we have two
pro-sumer dishwashers that we individually load after  dinner).


> >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!


This  was a really annoying problem that Songaia solved at a fairly modest
cost -  which
is generally how we like to do things here.

We're really  pleased with our, according to code, "operable wall" - it
slides  open
and closed - and provides a quite sound-proof barrier for the  larger
opening. It only has
a handle on one side and is heavy, both by  design to discourages its use as
a "sliding door."
It has become  something of a symbol to close the wall and generally only
used
with  some intention - for example, we close it when we celebrate  residents'
birthdays by asking our traditional "birthday questions" - then  we open it
as the special,
by-request deserts are brought to singing and  blowing out the candles (we
had our first
monthly birthdays, just last  night)

(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.)
>

Our  wall wasn't rocket science, but it sure was a nice juicy project for  our
community
figure-it-out folks (two architects, one engineer, and one  Mr. Fix-it guy).
They puttered
around with different designs and it was  entirely a do-it-yourself project
that used two
heavy, solid-core doors  as the wall.

My hope is that these types of innovations find their way  onto the Cohousing
Website,
but that will require more people to jump  into the fray and help us
transform it into a
more valuable  resource.

Craig
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