Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Designing common house

[Muriel Kranowski (murielk]

I agree with all the very good advice so far, and also want to recommend a 
janitor's closet to aid in general common house cleaning.

Ours contains a fairly large floor-level sink for washing mops, filling and 
emptying buckets of (dirty when emptied) water used for washing floors, and 
other dirty wet work. There is a lot of shelving where we store cleaning 
supplies, buckets, rags, rubber gloves, sponges, etc., plus stores of 
toilet paper, hand-drying paper towels, and liquid soap for the bathrooms, 
bulk detergent for the dishwashers, and the like. We also store the vacuum 
cleaner in there, plus brooms and mops hanging on one wall. Cleaning the CH 
would be hard to do without this space and its sink.

It's been mentioned many times over the years but can't be stressed enough 
- make sure the dining area has some kind of effective noise-muting so 
people can chat while eating. Padded or doubled fabric ceiling panels can 
work well. Ours were custom made for us a few months after we started using 
the CH, when the need became quite obvious!

One thing we did not include that I wish we had is a pantry off the 
kitchen. We make do with shelving and cabinets but I think a pantry would 
be convenient.

    Muriel
    Shadowlake Village Cohousing
    Blacksburg, VA