Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Common House and Kitchen Housekeeping

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Feb 26, 2024, at 12:30 PM, Vickie Martin <vickiem5451 [at] gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> I've spent the morning perusing Cohousing-L, looking for ideas on setting
> up housekeeping cleaning schedules, and have not seen any updates since
> 2015. There's good information there, and I would appreciate any new
> updates and ideas.

For years we had a common house cleaning crew who cleaned at 10:00 every other 
Saturday morning. It worked very well and we had a very clean common house. And 
the cleaning crew also enjoyed working together and resisted any suggestion of 
changes — like hire cleaners and encourage people to cook meals instead. They 
enjoyed cleaning and cleaning together.

Then we started having workdays more regularly and some people on the regular 
cleaning crew “aged out”. The smaller crew blended with workdays, but workdays 
rarely happen more than once a month and not always every month. It wasn’t 
enough and people began noticing dirty windows, window sills, etc. Complaints.

Twice a month cleaning of the whole common house worked fine for vacuuming 
furniture and floors, moping floors, dusting, cleaning windows, etc. But we 
also have 2-3 members who automatically straighten up any room they walk 
through during the week. And right now we don’t have a heavy population of 
messy people — 1-2 makes a big difference.

On workdays, a deeper cleaning would be scheduled once a year for special areas 
or tasks — the exercise room, kitchen, workshop, basement, etc. One workday for 
decluttering drawers and closets, and inventorying kitchen equipment. Workdays 
on a regular schedule were very important to upping the bar on cleaning.

In addition to the gardening team doing regular weeding, etc., there is a 
grounds workday, I think, twice a year. Spring and fall.

Our meal teams generally clean very well after meals — your community is new 
and it does take time to get everyone on the same page in terms of clean enough 
or not clean enough.

On residential dishwashers — for years I decluttered the common house 1-3 times 
during the week. We had a commercial sanitizer that was run maybe once a week, 
often every two weeks. The dish return tray counter was always littered with 
glasses and odd plates that had been left around. The meal teams would complain 
about having to wash a load of left over dishes before they could wash the 
dishes from their meals. When we switched to residential dishwashers there were 
no more dishes left around. The dishwasher would get filled, dishes out of 
site, and it would be run by someone when it was full. 

I would say, however, that the kitchen floor is never clean enough and the 
Marmoleum is wearing faster than it should. Any water attracts dust and the 
dust is ground into the floor. Having a person who loves the kitchen floor 
would be wonderful — someone who takes pride in cleaning it weekly. And 
polishes it when needed.

We’ve been told by people doing a circuit of visits to common houses that ours 
is the cleanest they have seen. 

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