Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Working from the common house or other common spaces?

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Jun 5, 2023, at 7:14 PM, Marilyn Kakudo <mkakudo [at] comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> We’re having difficulty matching our limited inventory of units to the needs 
> and resources of these potential member households. One solution might be to 
> provide a small office or workspace in our common house that is shareable or 
> schedule-able in some way. Is this something your cohousing community has 
> done or tried?

Regularly "forever” but with a great increase during the pandemic we have had 
people working in the CH. There are several areas where they work — the living 
room, a corner of the dining room, the office, the game room, and the guest 
rooms. Some just like to get out of their units and others need a quiet place 
to take or make a Zoom call. During the pandemic especially the guest rooms 
were empty so very available. There are even more areas of the CH where a quiet 
corner could be found. One person did a job interview on Zoom in the "Take It 
Or Leave It” corner at the top of the third-floor stairs.

With a laptop and a smartphone there is no need to leave things “set up,” so 
they don’t move in or occupy the space exclusively. There has been some 
pushback when someone tried to use the space continuously — it’s not always 
pleasant to go to the common house and see the same person every day all day 
and hear them making phone calls, etc. no matter how nice they are. Meeting 
with clients, agents, brokers, etc., on a continuous basis would require a room 
that could be closed off and a separate entrance, I think.

We have a small room that we have called the game room (Legos, Wii, video 
games) that pre-pandemic we were planning to set up as a place where teens 
could study. By now those teens are in college but when I started thinking 
about what the room might be used for now, I think we would have the same usage 
by adults working at home. The room would probably have 2-3 card table-sized 
folding tables,  a 2-seat sofa, and a wall-mounted television.

We have also had situations where the nanny took care of the children in the 
common house and the adults worked at home. A baby who was a light sleeper 
slept better in the playroom or the guestrooms than at home with parents 
talking and phones ringing. Another nanny cared for 2 toddlers all the time in 
the CH. She would also take them out walking and to the library so they weren’t 
constantly there but that was her base. The parents delivered the kids to her 
there in what she called “the lobby."

During the Pandemic we had 2 households that formed a bubble and the parents 
traded off watching the kids in the playroom or on the playground. They were 
even homeschooling part of the time. Another household with 2 children had a 
grandmother who came for several hours 2-3 days a week and used the playroom to 
do crafts with them.

In at least one case, a music teacher used a spare room in someone else's unit 
to give lessons. Another wanted to rent a room for her office and for her 
parents to stay as guests occasionally — I’m not sure she found it but it could 
have been possible. 

Except for renting a room, none of these situations involved reserving the 
space exclusively with no end in sight. 

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org