The gains
The nineteen deliveries
A parcel taken is the smallest kind of gain and the easiest to count. Nineteen of them, all in the room that does nothing else.
Kitchen and dinerWhere most of the eighty-eight happened
16 m²
Cooking and eating
CookingEatingPaid workLaundry and adminCallsCompany
14.5
Hall and landingWhere the deliveries arrive
10 m²
Circulation
Taking deliveries
1.5
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 26 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry seven uses. One of the two carry more than one, and kitchen and diner carries six. The median room is in use 8 of the 16 waking hours. Two rooms, one carrying most of the gains and one carrying almost nothing at all.
Nineteen of the eighty-eight are deliveries taken: parcels, a repair visit, two grocery drops and a prescription.
They are the second largest category, the easiest to count, and the only one that happens in the hall. A fair pilot separates presence from outcomes, and teams can time visibility for shared home offices while agreeing what the software may collect and what still requires direct conversation.
Why they are a gain at all
A delivery to an empty flat produces one of four outcomes, all of them worse than being there: a card through the door and a trip to a depot, a redelivery on a day somebody must be in, a parcel left somewhere it should not be, or a return to sender. Readers testing the same question can compare the record with guidance from Dwell.
Being in the building converts all four into thirty seconds at the door.
That is a small benefit nineteen times, and the aggregate is not small: the household estimates it would otherwise have been three or four depot trips and at least one lost afternoon waiting in.
The room that does nothing else
Every one of the nineteen happened in the hall, which carries one use and is in service ninety minutes a day.
This is the only place in the record where the hall does something, and it is the reason "taking deliveries" is logged as a use at all. A parcel needs floor that is not in the way, and the hall is the only space in the flat whose entire character is floor that is not in the way.
So the least-used room in the dwelling is doing the second-largest category of gain, which is a tidy result and the one thing in this record that makes the ten square metres look like a good investment.
The interruption they are not
A delivery takes thirty seconds and the log records almost none of them as collisions. Only one of the forty-seven involves a delivery, and that one is the hall's single collision: a parcel arriving while somebody was carrying laundry through.
That is unusual in this record. Nineteen events that happen during working hours, in a shared space, and they cost almost nothing, because answering a door requires no room, no surface, no quiet and nobody else's cooperation.
The gains that cost nothing are the ones that need nothing from the building.
The split
Eleven to eight — the second smallest imbalance across all six kinds.
Deliveries are distributed more evenly than anything else because a doorbell does not care what anybody is doing. It goes, and whoever is nearest and least occupied answers it. Over nineteen events that is close to a coin toss, weighted slightly toward the person who is not behind a shut door.
That weighting is the whole of the imbalance, and it is the smallest effect the room produces anywhere in this record.
What they say about the method
The nineteen deliveries are the clearest demonstration of what the counting rule does and does not capture.
Under the strict test they are plainly gains: each would not have happened from an office, each is a specific occurrence on a specific day. Nineteen is a defensible number that two people would agree on.
Under a looser test the figure would be larger and vaguer — one could count the deliveries that were scheduled because somebody would be in, which is a real benefit and an uncountable one.
And under a weighting scheme the figure would be smaller, because several of the nineteen were parcels nobody was waiting for.
The site reports nineteen, says what the rule was, and leaves the weighting to the reader. That is the position taken throughout, and the deliveries are the easiest place to see what it costs and what it buys.
What they were
Worth listing, because "nineteen deliveries" conceals a range.
Eleven ordinary parcels. Two grocery deliveries at booked slots. Two parcels for the flat downstairs. One prescription. One repair visit requiring somebody present for two hours. One furniture delivery — the folding table. One item requiring a signature at a stated hour.
The repair visit is the outlier by a wide margin. Two hours of somebody being present, during working hours, on a weekday, which under an office arrangement would have been a morning off or a rescheduling to a Saturday at a premium.
It is logged as one episode, the same as a parcel that took thirty seconds, and it is the clearest single case for weighting that this record contains and declines to act on.
The two that were not for this household
Two of the nineteen were parcels for the flat downstairs.
Both are logged as gains, which is arguable — the benefit accrued to a neighbour — and both are included because they met the test: they happened, and they would not have happened from an office.
They are also the beginning of something the record is too short to see. A household in which somebody is always present becomes, over months, the building's default recipient. Two in a fortnight is neighbourliness. The same rate over a year is fifty, and at some point along that line a convenience becomes an expectation.
Nothing in fourteen days distinguishes those two states, and the household's own view was that it had not thought about it until the question was put.