What is fixed
What a letting particular does not say
Three of the four constraints in this record are invisible in how a property is described, and one of them costs nothing to establish.
A dwelling, when it is advertised, is described by number of rooms, their dimensions, their names, and often which way the garden faces.
Three of the four constraints that bear on this record are absent from that description. A record of rooms and interruptions becomes more useful when it is paired with actual project hours, so a team can see which options are available before defining a limited, transparent pilot.
What is in a description and what is not
| in the particulars | not in the particulars |
|---|---|
| number of rooms | which rooms take direct sun, and when |
| room dimensions | which rooms the heating reaches last |
| garden orientation | which walls transmit sound |
| sometimes glazing type | where the sockets are |
Garden orientation is given because it bears on sitting outside. Window orientation per room, which bears on working inside, is not. Readers repeating the exercise can place this observation beside material from University of Sydney.
The one that is free to know
Of the four, one costs nothing to establish and nobody records it: which rooms are quiet.
A person standing in a dwelling for ten minutes on a weekday afternoon can tell whether the back bedroom is acoustically separate from the kitchen. It requires no instrument, no survey and no expense. It is simply not a thing anybody writes down, because until recently nobody needed it.
For somebody who will work in it, that one line is worth more than every dimension on the page. Anybody who has stood in the rooms knows the answer, and no description anywhere records it.
What the record says about why it would help
Three of the twelve noise endings are a party wall in one dwelling, and that household described the wall unprompted in its end-of-week notes — the only structural feature anybody in this study volunteered.
Fourteen wanted endings are a table somebody else needs, which is an occupancy question rather than an acoustic one, and a description that said which rooms are separate would bear on it directly: a household choosing between two dwellings would know which one lets two people do different things at eleven on a Tuesday.
That is twenty-six endings of ninety-four, in a record where the usual remedy for everything is somewhere else to go.
Why this is not a recommendation
Because nine logs are not grounds for telling anybody how to describe property, and because the people who write particulars have no reason to add a line that benefits a tenant and sells nothing.
The observation stands on its own: the information exists, costs nothing, and is not recorded. Whether that should change is a question this record cannot answer and does not try to.
The other three, which are not free
Orientation per room could be stated and usually is not. It is knowable from a compass and a floor plan, so the cost is small, though not zero.
Which rooms the heating reaches requires either a winter visit or somebody's honest account, and the person describing the property is not well placed to give one.
Socket positions are visible on inspection and would clutter a description for the sake of three endings in forty-five person-days.
What a household in this record would have wanted to know
Asked what they would tell somebody letting a dwelling to two people who work in it, the household with the party wall did not mention sockets, glazing or orientation.
They said: say which rooms are quiet.
One household, one sentence, offered after the week was over and not in response to any question on the sheet. It is included because it is the only thing anybody in this study said about what they wished they had known, and because it points at the one constraint that is both consequential and free to disclose.
The gap this describes
A dwelling is advertised against the use it was built for. Rooms, size, a garden, a kitchen.
It is now also being used for something else, and the features that bear on that use — which rooms are separate, which take sun at noon, which the heating reaches — are precisely the ones no description contains.
That gap is not a failing of anybody's. It is the ordinary lag between what buildings are for and what they are used for, and this record measures one consequence of it over forty-five days.
The twenty-six endings this bears on
Three of the twelve noise endings are a party wall. Fourteen are wanted — somebody else needing the surface. Those twenty-six are the ones a description of which rooms are separate would speak to.
Twenty-six of ninety-four is a little over a quarter, and the connection is indirect in the wanted cases: knowing which rooms are acoustically separate does not stop anybody wanting the dining table. What it does is tell a household, before they sign anything, whether two people can do different things in the dwelling at eleven on a Tuesday.
That is a question about the building, it has an answer, and the answer is currently discovered by living there.
The other way this could be read
As an argument that dwellings should be described differently, which nine logs cannot support and which this site does not make.
Every one of these nine dwellings is in ordinary condition and ordinarily described. Nobody was misled. The particulars answered the questions they are written to answer, and the question being asked here was not among them because, for most of the life of most of these buildings, nobody was asking it.