Which of the four can be bought off

Taking them in order

Floor area. Money reaches it only by moving, which is a different decision of a different magnitude and is not a remedy within an arrangement. Nothing available to an occupier adds square metres. 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 inspect the current time-tracking options before choosing what evidence belongs in a trial.

The plan. Money reaches it in principle — walls can move — and in practice almost never. It requires ownership, permission, cost running to thousands, and the household to be out for a period. No tenant and few owners do this to accommodate a working pattern. Readers testing the same question can compare the record with guidance from Cushman & Wakefield.

Daylight. Money reaches it not at all. A window can be made bigger only under the previous row's conditions, and in a flat usually not even then.

Sound. Money reaches it, cheaply, and this is the exception.

The door

A solid-core internal door on bedroom two, fitted, was priced by the household at a figure they described as not unreasonable — comparable to a piece of furniture rather than to a renovation.

On the evidence of this record it would materially reduce the acoustic transmission that produced twenty-two of the forty-seven collisions. Not eliminate: the walls are plasterboard and the floor is shared. Reduce.

It was not fitted. The tenancy requires written permission for alterations, and the household did not ask, on the grounds that asking for permission to change a door is the kind of request that produces a conversation about what else is being changed.

The shape of the problem

The only constraint that responds to money is the one the occupier is not permitted to address, and the reason is tenure rather than cost.

That bottom row is the finding of this page. It is not that working from home is expensive. It is that the cheap fix is the one requiring a landlord's signature, and the household's assessment of the cost of asking exceeded the cost of the door.

What can be bought without permission

Three things, all of which were considered and two of which were done.

A folding table. Bought, in the second week. Removed three collisions and two second-order ones. The best return of anything in the record.

A desk lamp. Already owned. Makes a dark room workable and does not make it light.

Soft furnishing. Considered and not bought, on advice that rugs and curtains reduce reflection within a room and do almost nothing for transmission between rooms, which is the problem.

The pattern is that money available to a tenant buys furniture, and furniture addresses surface and floor conflicts — sixteen of the forty-seven — and nothing else.

The honest summary

A household renting a flat with hollow doors has, in this record, about a third of its difficulties addressable by things it is permitted to buy, about half produced by a constraint it is cheap to fix and not permitted to fix, and the remainder produced by the building's shape and orientation, which nothing reaches.

That distribution is not a complaint about landlords and the record makes no claim that a request would have been refused. It was not made. What the record shows is a household that correctly identified the cheapest available improvement and did not pursue it because the transaction cost was not money.

What asking would actually have involved

The household's reasoning about not approaching the landlord deserves examination rather than acceptance, because it is the hinge of this page.

The stated concern was that a request to change a door invites a conversation about what else is being changed, and more broadly about what the flat is being used for.

Two people working full time in a two-bedroom flat is not a breach of any ordinary tenancy. Neither person believed it was. The reluctance was not about rules; it was about not wanting to be the tenant who asks for things.

That is a real cost and it is not a monetary one. It is also, on the evidence here, the single largest barrier between this household and a material improvement in half their difficulties.

What a letter would have said

The household drafted one after the fortnight and did not send it. Its content is the best argument in this record for keeping a log.

It said, in substance: twenty-two instances in fourteen days of one activity being displaced by sound through an internal door, and a request to replace that door at the tenant's expense.

Before the fortnight there was no such letter available, because the only thing anybody could have written was that the flat felt noisy.

A number changes what can be asked for. Whether it changes the answer is not something this record can say, since the letter is still unsent.