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Checklists · Small spaces

Home Office & Small Space Planning Checklists

Small spaces and shared spaces fail for specific reasons: two things needing the same square metre, a door that cannot open, nowhere for a thing to live. These checklists help you find those conflicts on paper rather than after the joinery arrives.

Nothing here prescribes an ergonomic setup, makes a health claim, or recommends a product. Fixings, loadings and any electrical work belong with qualified professionals.

20 checklists in this category

What this area covers

Planning topics in this category

Each checklist prepares one specific conversation or decision point. None of them determines compliance, suitability or cost.

  • What has to coexist in one space
  • Reach, circulation and door swings
  • Power, cabling and acoustic questions to raise
  • Storage decisions in compact rooms

Checklists in this category

Browse the checklists

Every checklist is educational owner-side preparation: decisions to weigh, documents to gather and questions to bring to qualified professionals.

Home Office Brief →A way to describe how you actually work at home before design begins, covering equipment, competing uses, interruptions and the fixed features of the room.Desk and Position Decisions →A structured way to work out where a desk can sit, covering daylight across the day, what sits behind you, reach across the surface and the room a chair needs.Cable and Power Questions →Preparation for a conversation about power and cabling in a home working space, covering what gets plugged in, where power arrives and how cables reach the desk.Home Office Acoustic Questions →Listening notes for a home working room: noise arriving from the household and from outside, what your own working day sends out, and how calls sound at the far end.Home Office Storage Planning →Planning storage for a home working space, covering work paper, equipment kept nearby, the surface everything lands on and what has to stay out of sight or reach.Video Call Planning →What a camera and microphone quietly reveal about a home working room: the background, light on your face, what the far end hears, and who walks in mid call.Shared Home Office Planning →For homes where more than one person works in the same room: overlapping calls, two working positions, belongings that must not mix, and rules agreed before anything is fitted.Small Apartment Planning →A way to prepare a compact apartment for planning, covering the fixed service core, the entrance sequence, the limits the building itself imposes and storage that goes upward.Studio Flat Zoning →Preparation for dividing one room into areas that can coexist, covering sleeping beside living, the cooking edge, dividers, sightlines and the daily switch between uses.Compact Kitchen Questions →Questions to prepare before a small kitchen is designed, covering usable worktop, appliances that earn their place, reach, extraction and what the room gives up to gain storage.Small Hallway Planning →How to describe a narrow hall before storage is designed into it: the door arc, wet outdoor clothing, colliding door swings, borrowed daylight and where the wear lands.Under-Stair Space Planning →Preparation for the space beneath a staircase, covering its sloping shape, what already occupies it, how it would be reached and the questions enclosing it raises.Alcove and Nook Planning →Getting a recess described accurately before joinery is designed for it: out of square walls, what a chimney breast may hide, depth, open or closed fronts and trim junctions.Small Space Furniture →Which pieces stay and which go in a compact home, how much daily effort a transforming piece asks for, and what to settle about depth, fixing and access before an order is placed.Multi-Use Room Planning →Naming every job a single room is being asked to do, understanding how it switches between them, and recording the compromises before anything is fitted.Small Space Daylight →Questions for observing how daylight actually behaves in a compact room, what is taking it away, and what to raise with a qualified professional before design begins.Small Space Storage Decisions →Taking an honest inventory of what a compact home has to hold, weighing cupboard depth against floor area, and recording the storage decisions before joinery is drawn.Balcony Space Planning →Questions to settle before planning anything on a balcony, covering who controls it, how it drains, what the weather does to it and what belongs with qualified professionals.Loft Room Use Planning →Describing a roof space honestly, working out where a person can genuinely stand and what it might realistically hold, and gathering the questions for qualified professionals.Small Space Handover →A way to prepare for taking on a finished compact room, testing everything that opens against everything else and collecting the information before people leave.

Go deeper

Related Build Design Hub guides

Explanatory guidance behind the decisions these checklists prepare you for.

Small space design →Explanatory guides on compact and multi-use spaces.Storage & organisation →Background on storage planning and organisation.Room remodeling →How single-room changes are usually planned.All checklist categories →Back to the full Project Planning Checklists library.