Community Home Improvement Collective: CHIC!
We met up with our neighbors today to discuss the second year of CHIC, which is a community effort to spend four hours once a month doing whatever work needs to be done at one household from the group. We have five households in the group—giving us ten hard-working adults to clean, build, shovel, and paint whatever gets in our way—and will be starting it all up in about a month.
Basically, how it works is that the couple who’s house is being worked on will have breakfast and chores ready to go at 8:30 AM when everyone else shows up. We then work for four hours on the projects and get as much finished as possible. At about 12:30 PM, we finish up and head over to the house of the family that will be receiving the work in the next month for lunch and whatever discussion about planning, etc. that needs to take place. Since there are five households participating, we generally have ten adults who are hard at work for four straight hours. A lot can be accomplished in that much time and with that many people.
Last year the projects that we put forth at our house were to remove all of the overgrown ground cover in the front part of the yard, to build a new raised bed and fill it with dirt/mulch/compost, paint the front steps up to the house, scrape the old paint off the window frame in the bathroom (we were still working on the bathroom remodel job), dig out the ground around where the canoe stand was built, and to have all of the outsides of the windows washed. Other projects that took place with other households were to paint a living room and dining room, lots of garden work (pulling in piles of compost, mulch, and gravel), or to strip some cabinets and paint a kitchen. Essentially, anything that requires lots of grunt-work (e.g., painting, weeding, or shoveling) is fair game and likely to take place.
So today we had the first formal meeting over a pot-luck brunch to plan who gets what month and decide what summer months wouldn’t work for CHIC. (I took over some tasty lean peppered bacon and honey yogurt.) Our month will be later in the year (October), which will work well for harvesting the gardens and preparing the house, garden beds, and bees for the winter. Maybe if it’s dry enough, we could even plan on painting the exterior of the house. Hmmm…
On a side note: we placed the order for the bees and their hive today! The parts should be all built and ready for pick-up next weekend. After that, we’ll have to prime and paint the boxes and get them all set for when the ladies show up in April!
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