The rooms
The room that became a desk
Nine square metres, three uses, and one of them happens six nights a year.
Kitchen and dinerSix uses, and never off duty
16 m²
Cooking and eating
CookingEatingPaid workLaundry and adminCallsCompany
14.5
Bedroom twoThe small bedroom became the desk and stayed a bedroom
9 m²
Sleeping
Paid workCallsGuest sleeping
8
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 25 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry nine uses. Two of the two carry more than one, and kitchen and diner carries six. The median room is in use 11.25 of the 16 waking hours. The most loaded room and the most changed one, from the five counted here.
Bedroom two is nine square metres: the smallest room in the flat, smaller than the hall. It carries three uses — paid work, calls, and sleeping for guests, which happened twice in the fortnight and perhaps six times a year.
Functionally it is one room doing one job, and that job is somebody's employment. 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 compare this product page with the pilot brief before choosing what evidence belongs in a trial.
What it took to get there
The room contains a desk, a chair, two monitors, a filing box and a folding bed. The bed is against the wall and is unfolded only when somebody stays. A separate perspective on homes, workplaces, or remote work is available from How-To Geek.
That arrangement is the result of a decision that is easy to describe and was not easy to make: the household gave up a bedroom. Not temporarily, not partially — the second bedroom stopped being a room anybody could sleep in without twenty minutes of rearrangement.
In exchange, one of the two jobs got a door that shuts, a desk that does not need clearing, and a background that is the same every day.
The arithmetic of nine square metres
Nine square metres is enough for one person working and nothing else, and the log shows exactly that with no ambiguity.
| floor | 9 m² |
| uses | 3 |
| hours in service | 8.0 |
| collisions | 3 of 47 |
| collisions per hour in service | the lowest in the flat |
Three collisions in a fortnight is the second-lowest count in the dwelling, and the lowest if you weigh it against hours in use. A room carrying one real job does not collide with itself.
That is the entire benefit and it is substantial. One of the two people in this household has a place where their work can be interrupted only by a person opening a door, and the log shows that happening three times in fourteen days.
What was given up
Three things, and the household's own account of them is mixed.
A guest room. Guests now sleep in a room containing somebody's work. Two stays in the fortnight; both were described as fine, and in both the visitor was told what the room was.
Storage. The filing box displaced what the room used to hold. Three bags of it moved to the top of the wardrobe in bedroom one, which is one of the reasons bedroom one now carries "dressing and storage" as a logged use.
The option. This is the one nobody mentions until asked. A spare room is a room that could become something: a nursery, a study for the other person, somewhere to put a parent for a fortnight. A spare room with a desk in it has already become something, and un-becoming it is a project rather than a decision.
Why the other job did not get one
There is one room like this and two people who work. The obvious question is why the arrangement was not symmetrical, and the answer is that there is no second small room.
What happened instead is that the other job — the interruptible one — distributed itself across the kitchen, the living room and bedroom one, three rooms rather than none. Four of the nineteen uses in this flat are that job finding somewhere to be.
The consequence is the subject of the third part of this site, and it is the sharpest finding in the record: the person without a room absorbed thirty-one of the forty-seven collisions, and also received fifty-two of the eighty-eight gains. Both follow from the same fact.
The general shape
A dwelling with one spare room and two workers does not split the room in half. It allocates it entirely to one of them, because half a nine square metre room is not a workspace.
The allocation then determines, for the whole duration of the arrangement, which of the two people has a door and which has a household. Nothing about that decision feels momentous at the time — somebody has more calls, so they take the quiet room — and nothing revisits it afterwards.
On this record it was decided in a conversation lasting a few minutes, in the week before the fortnight began, on entirely sensible grounds, and it is the single most consequential fact in the log.
What nine square metres will take
The room holds a desk, a chair, two monitors, a filing box and a folding bed against the wall. It will not hold a second chair, which turned out to matter twice in the fortnight.
Both occasions were the same: somebody wanted to come in and talk while the other was between calls, and there was nowhere to be. Once the conversation happened in the doorway; once it moved to the kitchen, which is logged as a collision because the work in the kitchen gave way.
That is a small thing with a general shape. A room sized for one activity does not accommodate the person-to-person business of a household, and the business then relocates to wherever there is room, which is the already-contested space.
The door is doing more than the room
Asked what bedroom two provides that the kitchen table does not, the answer given was not quiet and not the desk.
You can leave things out.
A room that belongs to one use does not have to be cleared. The papers stay where they were, the second monitor stays plugged in, and starting work in the morning takes no time at all.
The interruptible job starts its day by clearing a space on the kitchen table and ends it by clearing the table again for dinner, twice a day, every day. The log records those as table-clearing rather than as collisions, and there are eleven of them in fourteen days.
Nine square metres buys the right to leave a thing where it is. On this record that is worth more to the person who has it than the quiet is, and it is not available to anybody working in a shared room at any size of dwelling.