What is fixed
The cheap one and the uncorrectable one
One of the four constraints could have gone differently for very little money. One could not have gone differently at any price.
Four features of these buildings bear on most of the endings in this record. They are not the same kind of thing as each other, and the difference decides what anybody can reasonably ask for.
The four, sorted differently
| constraint | at build | afterwards | endings |
|---|---|---|---|
| socket position | nearly free | awkward, needs permission | 3 |
| sound transmission | a specification | expensive, often impossible | 12 |
| glazing and insulation | a specification | very expensive | 18 |
| orientation | not a choice | impossible at any price | 24 |
Reading down that table, the cost of having got it right rises and the possibility of correcting it falls, and the number of endings rises with both. These household notes describe the setting, not the whole workday, so decision-makers can tracked hours across remote projects and then interpret any system data beside outcomes and direct employee feedback.
The cheap one
A double socket on the wall where somebody now works, rather than behind where a bed was assumed to go, costs almost nothing when the wall is open. For broader research beyond this small household record, consult work published by Australian National University.
Afterwards it costs a tradesman, a day, and — in at least three of these nine dwellings — a landlord who has no particular reason to agree.
Three endings in this record turn on it, which is not many. The reason it is worth stating is the ratio: a decision worth a few pounds at one moment and a morning's work plus somebody else's permission at every subsequent moment.
The uncorrectable one
Where a building stands, and therefore which way its rooms look, falls out of the boundary, the access and whatever the consent allowed. Whoever drew these nine dwellings had little say in it.
Twenty-four endings in this record — a quarter of the total — follow from that. No amount of money changes it, nobody made a mistake, and there is nothing to recommend.
One of the four is a procurement question. One is a policy question. One is construction history. One is geometry.
Why the distinction is not academic
Because it determines what a reasonable expectation looks like.
A specification can be revised: future buildings can have better glazing and more sockets, and some do. That is a sentence about policy, and nine logs are not grounds for a policy, but at least the sentence is the right shape.
A site cannot be revised. A claim about orientation is not a claim that anything should be different; it is an observation that a quarter of the endings in this record follow from a fact about the world.
What a household should take from it
Not very much, which is the point.
Of the four constraints, exactly one — the socket — has a remedy a household might plausibly pursue, and it accounts for three endings in forty-five person-days.
Everything else on the fixed side of the ledger is either a conversation with a landlord, a sum of money most tenants do not have, or the angle of the sun.
The decision nobody made
Worth naming, because it is the shape of the whole section.
Nobody decided that a spare room should have one socket behind the bed. Nobody decided that a back room should be the last room the heating reaches. Nobody decided that a window should face the direction it faces.
Each of those followed from an assumption that held for most of the life of most of these buildings: that the dwelling would be empty during the day and occupied in the evening, and that the rooms people worked in would be somewhere else entirely.
The assumption was correct when the decisions were made. It is the assumption that has changed, not the quality of the decisions, and there is no villain anywhere in this record.
What that leaves
A dwelling doing what it was built to do, used for something it was not built for, producing about forty-two endings in forty-five person-days from features that were settled before anybody arrived.
Nothing in that sentence is anybody's fault and nothing in it is fixable by effort.
The table read the other way
Sorted by endings, the four constraints come out in exactly reverse order of how correctable they are.
orientation 24 endings impossible
glazing 18 very expensive
sound 12 expensive, often impossible
sockets 3 awkward, needs permission
There is no obvious reason this should be so. It is not a general law that big problems are hard problems; it happens to be true of these four features in these nine dwellings.
But it does mean that a household working down the list in order of size will spend its effort in order of futility, and a household working in order of tractability will start with three endings in forty-five person-days.
Whichever end of the list you start from, the first thing you can actually do is the smallest thing on it.
What this is not an argument for
Doing nothing.
Thirty-six of the ninety-four endings are within a household's reach, and none of the four constraints on this page touches them. They are wanted, surface, elsewhere and seat — who uses which table, how much area there is, where the charger lives, what the chair is.
This page is about the other fifty-eight, and the point of separating them is not to counsel resignation. It is so that a household that has done everything available to it, and finds the endings continue, knows what it is looking at.