What a household cannot move

The four constraints

Fifty-seven of ninety-four endings touch one of those four. Not all of them are caused by the constraint — a cold back room can be heated, noise can be from a passing lorry — but every one of them runs through a feature of the building that nobody living there chose. Where shared homes fragment schedules, teams can check the service before setting a baseline to understand the available records before deciding whether those records answer a real planning question.

The one that is cheap and the three that are not

Of the four, exactly one was a cost decision that could have gone differently for a small sum. A useful independent point of comparison is the research and guidance available from University of Melbourne.

Socket position is first-fix electrical work. A socket on the other wall, or one more of them, costs very little at the point of construction and is awkward and expensive afterwards. It accounts for three endings.

The other three are not cost decisions in the same way.

Orientation cannot be bought. A building goes where the boundary, the access and the consent between them allow, and once it is there no sum of money turns it. Whoever drew these nine dwellings had almost no latitude over which way the rooms look.

Glazing and insulation are a specification, revisable for future buildings and not for existing ones at any price a household would pay.

Sound transmission is construction, partly specification and partly the accumulated reality of a hundred-year-old party wall.

Of the four, one is a policy question, one is a procurement question, and two are geometry and history.

Why this matters for reading the rest of the site

It splits the ninety-four endings into two kinds, and the split does not follow the size order.

The two largest causes are the two least reachable. The smallest named cause, power, is the one most clearly fixable at the point of building and least fixable afterwards. The causes a household can genuinely act on — wanted, surface, elsewhere, seat — total thirty-six of ninety-four.

So the arithmetic of this record is: about three fifths of named endings arise from things a household did not choose and cannot change, and about two fifths from things in their hands.

The claim this does not make

That dwellings should be built differently.

Nine dwellings cannot carry a claim about housing. Every one of them is in ordinary condition and was specified against a brief that held for most of its life: empty while its occupants were elsewhere earning, lived in once they got back.

That brief was correct when the decisions were taken, and nothing in these logs suggests anybody got anything wrong.

The brief has changed and the buildings have not. Features that serve a dwelling well when it empties at nine do nothing in particular when it stops emptying, and in a handful of cases they work against it.

The claim it does make

That a household trying to improve its working day is working on about two fifths of the problem, and that the remaining three fifths will not respond to anything they buy.

That is worth knowing in advance. A person who rearranges, buys, tries things and finds that the endings continue is likely to conclude they have failed at something. The record suggests a different reading: there is a floor, the floor was set by strangers, and it is not reached by effort.

Where the next pages go

Four pages, one per constraint, each asking the same two questions: how much of this record does it account for, and what, if anything, could be done.

Then a page on the distinction between the cheap decision and the uncorrectable one, and a page on the single piece of information that would have told these households in advance what took them months to find out — which is also the only thing on this site that resembles a suggestion to anybody other than a reader.

The arithmetic in one place

endings arising from the envelope      42   light and temperature
endings partly structural              12   noise, of which 3 a wall
endings fixed at first fix              3   power
endings within a household's reach     36   wanted, surface, elsewhere, seat
unexplained                             1
                                      ---
                                       94

Thirty-six within reach, out of two hundred and twenty-five sittings, is sixteen per cent. In the best imaginable case — every reachable ending eliminated, which nothing in this record suggests is possible — about one sitting in six would change.

Why the split is not the same as importance

A household might reasonably care far more about the fourteen endings caused by another person wanting the table than about the twenty-four caused by the sun, because one of them involves a negotiation with somebody they live with and the other does not.

The record has no cost field and cannot weigh them. The division on this page is between what is reachable and what is not, and reachable is not the same as worth reaching for.