Nový Mlýn Sustainable Housekeeping
I have been thinking about how to record what we are learning at Nový Mlýn. It would be really useful to have a written guide of how the house operates through the seasons; jobs that happen once a year or every day. At present, this repetitive work occupies a great deal of my time – taking time away from all the ongoing projects – things that would make a quantifiable improvement in our standard of living. This indicates that I need to improve my management skills. As visitors are with us for sometimes as little as a week, Joann suggested that I need to have more information written down.
Housekeeping is a shared task at Nový Mlýn, and every visitor currently chooses one task each day. We have a rota for housekeeping and meal preparation as we discovered that without a rota things just didn’t happen. “We’ll just make it up as we go along” = one person will have to do all jobs nobody else thinks about. I need to become better organised at training people housework skills, and I need to become stricter at ensuring these jobs are then done. If I am unable to take this role within the household, things fall apart pretty rapidly – as we’ve discovered times I’ve been ill or away. For Nový Mlýn to be sustainable – it should operate with or without me.
