What is fixed
Floor area is the wrong number
Sixty-eight square metres is the figure on the lease. Fifty-four is the figure that matters, and neither predicts how much work a home can absorb.
Hall and landingA quarter of the floor doing one job, and it cannot be given another
10 m²
Circulation
Taking deliveries
1.5
Bedroom twoThe smallest room doing the most concentrated work
9 m²
Sleeping
Paid workCallsGuest sleeping
8
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 19 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry four uses. One of the two carry more than one, and bedroom two carries three. The median room is in use 4.75 of the 16 waking hours. The least and most efficiently used rooms, by floor area against hours.
The flat is sixty-eight square metres. That is the number on the lease, in the listing and in every statistic about housing that will ever include it.
It is the wrong number for almost every question this record asks. When paid work competes with domestic use for the same room, teams need a record of hours and projects as well as a record of space; they can examine the reporting workflow before choosing what evidence belongs in a trial.
What comes off it first
| m² | available? | |
|---|---|---|
| total | 68 | |
| circulation | 10 | no |
| bathroom | 4 | no |
| available to the nineteen uses | 54 |
Twenty per cent of the dwelling is unavailable before any question of work arises, and the proportion is not a constant. A flat with a longer hall loses more; one with a bathroom off a bedroom loses less. Another useful point of comparison comes from American Institute of Architects.
Two dwellings of identical floor area can differ by ten per cent in usable space, and nothing in any listing distinguishes them.
Why fifty-four is still not the right number
Because the usable area is not a pool that activities draw from freely. It is five discrete rooms, and an activity cannot use three square metres of the living room and four of the kitchen.
What determines whether a dwelling absorbs a job is not how much floor it has but whether it has a room — a bounded space with a door that one activity can hold.
Bedroom two is nine square metres: thirteen per cent of the flat, and it absorbs an entire job. The living room is nineteen square metres, more than twice as large, and absorbs nothing exclusively because four other uses also want it.
A small room that belongs to one use is worth more than a large room that belongs to five.
The counting that would predict better
If a household wanted to know in advance whether a dwelling could absorb two jobs, the useful count is not square metres. It is:
- How many rooms have a door that shuts?
- Of those, how many can hold a desk and a chair?
- Of those, how many are not needed for something that happens during working hours?
In this flat the answers are four, three and one.
The one is bedroom two, and everything in this record about who gives way follows from that number being one rather than two.
A dwelling of ninety square metres arranged as a large open-plan living space and two bedrooms gives the same answer. A dwelling of sixty square metres with three small separate rooms gives two, and would produce a completely different fortnight.
What the household noticed afterwards
Asked what they would look for if they moved, both people said the same thing and neither said "bigger".
They said: a second room that can be shut.
That is a shift from a quantity to a count, and it is the practical output of having logged the fortnight. Before it, both would have answered the question with a square-metre figure, because that is the figure the market reports and therefore the figure people think in.
The statistic nobody collects
Housing data counts bedrooms. It does not count rooms with doors, and it does not count rooms available during working hours.
Bedroom two in this flat is recorded as a bedroom. It contains a desk, two monitors and a folding bed unfolded six nights a year, and it is in use as an office for eight hours a day.
Every statistic that includes this flat describes it as a two-bedroom dwelling housing two people, which is accurate and conveys nothing about the thing that determines how the household's days go.
What the market prices and what it does not
The flat's rent is set by square metres, bedrooms, postcode and condition. Those four explain almost all of the price.
Not one of them captures the thing this record found to matter: how many rooms can be shut, and how many of those are free during working hours.
Two flats at the same rent, same area and same bedroom count can differ by a factor of two on that measure — one with a through-room arrangement and an open-plan kitchen, one with four separate rooms off a hall.
Nothing in the listing distinguishes them, and until recently nothing needed to. The feature that now determines whether two people can work in a dwelling was not a feature anybody was pricing, because nobody was working in dwellings.
What the household would ask now
Asked what they would check if they moved, both people produced the same short list, and none of it is in square metres.
How many doors shut. Whether the kitchen is next to the living room or next to the hall. Which way the rooms face.
Three questions, all answerable from a floor plan and a compass, all free, and none of them asked when they took this flat.
That is the practical output of fourteen days of logging, and it is worth more than any of the numbers: a household that has counted knows what to look at next time, and the thing to look at turns out not to be the number everybody quotes.
Also on what the rooms are being asked to do