Chore Rotation & House Rules — Starting Templates

These are starting points, not a finished policy. Your program's actual rules should reflect your own level of structure and philosophy — a peer-run house and a staffed, structured house shouldn't have identical rules, and copying this verbatim isn't the goal.

Chore rotation starter

Common categories most houses end up tracking, in some form: kitchen (dishes, counters, trash), common/living areas, bathrooms, exterior trash and recycling day, yard or exterior upkeep, and setup/cleanup for the regular house meeting.

• A simple weekly rotation (each resident moves to the next category each week) is easy to explain and easy to verify, and it's what the in-app Chores feature is built to track.
• Assign a chore to a house when you want it shared/rotating among whoever lives there; assign it to a specific resident when it's a standing individual responsibility. Both show up the same way for verification.
• Decide up front what happens when someone moves in or out mid-rotation — the simplest approach is: new move-ins join the rotation at the next natural rotation point rather than mid-week, so nobody inherits a half-finished assignment.
• Chore completion is one of the inputs to the accountability view on a resident's page — a consistent rotation makes that number mean something; a rotation nobody actually follows doesn't.

House rules starter

A starter list of categories most programs end up covering, with the specifics left for you to fill in:

• Curfew — your house's actual time, and whether it differs by night of the week.
• Guest policy — whether guests are allowed, when, and whether they need to be announced ahead of time.
• Chore participation — tie this directly to the rotation above so residents see one consistent expectation, not two systems.
• Drug/alcohol testing and consequences — your program's actual testing cadence and what happens for a positive result, tied to your discharge/relapse documentation approach (see that template) rather than left as an unwritten assumption.
• Meeting attendance — what's expected (12-step, house meetings, or both) and how it's tracked.
• Room and shared-space upkeep — a simple, specific standard rather than "keep it clean."
• Conflict resolution — point residents to the in-app Grievances feature for anything they want formally reviewed rather than only handled informally.
• Safety basics — emergency contacts, what to do in a medical emergency, fire safety, medication storage if your program handles that.

Write these in language a new resident on their first day can actually understand and act on — specific enough that "did this happen or not" isn't a judgment call. That's the same discipline the discharge/relapse template above is built around, just applied earlier, before anything goes wrong.