What is fixed
Four things that cannot change
Floor area, sound, daylight and the plan. Every difficulty in this record traces to one of them, and only one can be bought off.
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.
Hall and landingA quarter of the floor doing one job
10 m²
Circulation A home-working policy is easier to review when assumptions are written down, so managers can privacy-conscious productivity evidence and decide which time and workload signals are proportionate.
Taking deliveries Readers testing the same question can compare the record with guidance from British Council for Offices.
1.5
Bedroom twoThe smallest room doing the most concentrated work
9 m²
Sleeping
Paid workCallsGuest sleeping
8
Kitchen and dinerThe most loaded
16 m²
Cooking and eating
CookingEatingPaid workLaundry and adminCallsCompany
14.5
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Three rooms covering 35 square metres, built for three things. Between them they now carry ten uses. Two of the three carry more than one, and kitchen and diner carries six. The median room is in use 8 of the 16 waking hours. Three of the five rooms, chosen for the range between them.
Everything in this record that could not be fixed traces to one of four properties of the building.
They were settled before anybody moved in, none of them is responsive to how the household behaves, and three of them cannot be bought off at any price a household would consider.
The four
Floor area. Sixty-eight square metres, of which ten are circulation and four are a bathroom. Fifty-four available to nineteen uses.
Sound. Hollow doors, plasterboard walls, a kitchen sharing a wall with the living room. A call and a conversation two rooms apart are audible to each other.
Daylight. Three of the five rooms face one way. Between November and February the kitchen is the only room usable without a lamp before ten.
The plan. Where the walls are, where the doors are, and therefore which rooms are reachable without passing through another.
Why these and not others
Because each one is upstream of several difficulties and none of them can be reached by rearrangement.
Heating, for instance, is not on the list, although it comes up constantly in discussions of working from home. It is a running cost rather than a constraint: it changes what the arrangement costs without changing what is possible in the building.
The four above change what is possible. The clearest test is to ask whether any amount of furniture-moving, scheduling or goodwill addresses them, and for all four the answer is no.
Which difficulties trace to which
| difficulty | traces to |
|---|---|
| one quiet room only | plan, sound |
| the kitchen carrying six uses | plan, daylight |
| nowhere for the second job | floor area |
| calls displacing everything | sound |
| the hall doing one job | plan |
| exercise in the kitchen | floor area |
Sound and the plan appear in four of the six. Floor area, which is the constraint everybody names first, appears in two.
That ordering is the most useful thing on this page: the thing people think limits a home for work is its size, and in this record the binding constraints were mostly about where the walls are and what passes through them.
The one that can be bought off
Sound, partially, and the record shows how far.
Two measures are available to a household: soft furnishing, which reduces reflection and does almost nothing for transmission, and replacing a hollow door with a solid one, which is a real improvement and which a tenant cannot make.
Neither was attempted during the fortnight. The household priced a solid door at a sum they described as not unreasonable and did not proceed, because they rent.
Of the four constraints, the only one money reaches is the one the occupier is not permitted to alter.
What this part of the site is for
Not resignation. The next part records what the household did change and what it was worth, and the answer is not nothing.
It is for separating the two kinds of difficulty, because a household that does not separate them spends its effort on the wrong one. Three months of rearranging furniture does not address the fact that two jobs need two quiet rooms and the flat has one, and a household that does not know that will conclude the problem is them.
A fifth candidate that was rejected
Furniture was considered for the list and does not belong on it.
The case for including it: the sockets in bedroom one are on the wall where a bed goes, which is why a desk there needs an extension lead, which is why bedroom one is not the quiet room. That is a fixture, it was settled by a developer, and the household cannot move it.
The case against, which won: an extension lead costs four pounds and the household has one. The constraint is an inconvenience with a price, which puts it on the same side of the line as heating.
The four on the list have no price available to an occupier. That is the test, applied consistently, and it is why a socket in the wrong place is not a constraint and a hollow door is — because the door cannot be changed at any price without permission.
How to read this part if you own the dwelling
The four are described from a tenant's position because that is the household's position.
An owner's list is shorter. The plan can be changed, at a cost running to thousands and with the household out for a period, which moves it from impossible to expensive. Sound becomes straightforwardly solvable: a door, and if necessary insulation in the shared wall.
What remains fixed for an owner is floor area and daylight, and those two account for perhaps a third of the difficulty in this record rather than all of it.
So the distribution of this site's findings between "fixable" and "fixed" is itself a function of tenure, and a reader who owns their home should discount the fatalism of this part by about half.
Also on what the rooms are being asked to do