Home Office Brief Preparation Checklist

Write down the hours you are genuinely at the desk on an ordinary working day, and note which of those hours are spoken for by meetings rather than quiet work.

Rooms that suit concentrated work and rooms that suit talking to people are not always the same room, and the split decides which one matters more.

Note who else is in the home during your working hours, what they are doing and which rooms they need while you are working.

The plan has to work for the household as well as for the worker, and a brief that ignores the others tends to get renegotiated later.

Record how often the work actually happens somewhere other than the intended room, such as the kitchen table or a sofa, and what draws you there.

The place people drift to usually has something the designated room lacks, and naming it is more useful than resolving to stop drifting.

Describe what has to be set up at the start of a working session and packed away at the end, including anything carried in from another room.

A setup that takes effort each time tends to be abandoned, so the brief should say plainly whether the space is allowed to stay set up.

Note which working days happen away from home entirely, and whether anyone else uses the room on those days.

A room that stands empty on some days is a different brief from one occupied continuously by the same person.

Separate the work that needs quiet from the work that involves talking, and note roughly how a typical day divides between the two.

This single distinction shapes almost every later decision about doors, desk position and soft materials in the room.

List every device that has to sit in the room, including screens, a laptop or tower, any printer or scanner, and anything that charges overnight.

Designers size a working surface from a list of objects, not from a general description of office work.

Decide and record how many screens the setup has to accommodate, and whether that number is likely to change with the way you work.

Screen arrangement drives the depth of the working surface and the position of nearly everything else on it.

Consider whether a printer is genuinely used, and if it is, note how often paper has to be reached, reloaded and collected.

Printers are among the items most often designed into a home office and least often used, and the space they take is rarely reclaimed.

Ask your employer or client what equipment they supply and what they expect the home to provide, and record the answer instead of assuming.

Supplied equipment sometimes arrives in sizes nobody planned for, and it is much easier to hear about before a desk is made.

Note which devices make a noise or give off warmth when running, and consider whether each one has to be in the same room as you.

Moving one noisy or warm item out of the room often does more for comfort than any other single change.

Record whether you work from paper alongside screens, and how much open surface has to be free at the same time for that to work.

Working from documents needs a different surface from working purely on screen, and this is easy to state now and awkward to add later.

List every other use the room has, such as a guest bed, laundry drying, hobbies, or a place the household keeps things that fit nowhere else.

Uses that are never written down are the ones a design quietly fails to allow for.

Decide whether the room has to stop looking like a workplace in the evening, and write down what that would involve in practice.

Concealment is a real design requirement with consequences for joinery, and it is far simpler to state at brief stage than to add later.

If the room doubles as a guest room, note where the bedding lives and everything that has to move before a guest can use the space.

Guest use is the requirement most often mentioned in passing and least often designed for.

Consider whether the working area can be closed off behind a door, and record what is on the other side of that door during working hours.

Whether a door can be shut changes the acoustic and visual brief completely, so it belongs near the top of the conversation.

Note how the room is used on non-working days, and whether the working setup is in the way when the household wants the space back.

A setup that is tolerable during the working day can be the main irritation at every other time.

Record what the household stores in this room that has nothing to do with work, and decide whether it stays or moves elsewhere.

Deciding this early avoids a design that quietly assumes the room will be emptied of everything else first.

Ask your employer or main client whether they have any requirements for a home working space, and record what they tell you in writing.

Requirements vary widely between organisations, and they occasionally rule out arrangements that otherwise look perfectly sensible.

Note whether you handle information that others in the household should not see or overhear, and what that implies for doors, screen position and paper storage.

Confidentiality is a spatial requirement as much as a procedural one, and it belongs in the brief rather than in an afterthought.

Ask a suitably qualified adviser what working from home may mean for your household arrangements, rather than assuming that nothing changes.

This is one of the few home working questions with consequences outside the room itself, and it depends entirely on your own situation.

Insurance, tax and employment questions relating to home working are for suitably qualified advisers, and nothing here is guidance on your circumstances.

Record whether anyone comes to the home for work, how they arrive, and which parts of the home they would pass through on the way in.

Visitors change the brief for the entrance, the route through the home and what has to stay presentable during the day.

Treat any question about whether part of the home may be used for a business at this address as something to confirm locally rather than to settle yourself.

What use is permitted at a particular address must be confirmed locally with the relevant authority, and no checklist can answer it on your behalf.

Ask who is responsible for maintaining, replacing and eventually removing work equipment kept at home, and write the answer down.

Responsibility for equipment tends to be assumed rather than agreed, which becomes awkward when something fails or a role comes to an end.

Write down the small things that irritate you most on an ordinary working day, in the words you would use to a friend rather than to a designer.

Plain descriptions of irritation carry more design information than tidily worded requirements usually do.

Note whether the room becomes uncomfortably cold or warm while you are sitting still in it, at which times of day, and what you currently do about it.

Sitting still is a different thermal experience from moving around, and a room that feels fine in passing can be unusable at a desk.

How a room is heated, cooled or ventilated is for the relevant qualified trades to assess and design, not something to settle from observation alone.

Record when glare or reflection on a screen forces you to move, close a blind or reposition yourself, and at what time of day it happens.

Glare is time-specific and easy to leave out of a brief, yet it often decides which way a desk can face at all.

Note what interrupts you, who does the interrupting, and whether it happens because the room is open, the door is thin, or nobody can tell you are busy.

Interruption has several different causes with completely different remedies, and naming the cause avoids solving the wrong problem.

Record what ends up on the floor, the windowsill or a nearby chair because the working surface has run out of room.

The overflow tells a designer what the surface is genuinely being asked to hold, which is usually more than anyone states.

Note how often you leave the room during working hours and what you go to fetch, since a repeated errand usually points at something missing.

The thing you keep fetching often belongs in the room, and the pattern only becomes visible once it is written down.

Mark on a rough sketch where the window, the radiator and any other heat emitter sit, and note how much wall each of them takes out of use.

These two features between them usually eliminate most of the plausible desk positions in a modest room.

Note which way the door swings and what part of the floor it needs, since that arc is often the only place a tall unit could otherwise stand.

Door arcs are among the easiest things to notice early and among the most annoying to discover once joinery has been drawn.

Note whether power and data arrive on the wall you imagine working against, or on the far side of the room, and say which in the brief.

Where power already arrives shapes an early plan, and it is one of the first things a designer asks about that owners rarely have to hand.

Any change to sockets, wiring or fixed electrical work is for the relevant qualified trade to assess, design and carry out.

If the ceiling slopes or the room sits under a roof, note how much of the floor area is genuinely usable, and whether that still makes this the right room.

A room can look ample on a plan and still offer very little space where an adult can stand, which is worth knowing before it is chosen at all.

Note which walls sound hollow and which sound solid, and record it as an observation for a qualified professional to check rather than as a conclusion.

What any wall is made of and what it can carry must be established by a qualified professional before shelving or a wall-hung desk is planned.

Record what the floor is, whether it is level enough for a chair to sit still, and whether a chair moving on it is heard elsewhere in the home.

Floor behaviour affects both the chair and anyone below, and both tend to surface later if they are not noted at brief stage.

Decide the single thing the finished space must get right, and write it as a sentence you would be willing to repeat at every later meeting.

A stated priority gives a designer something to defend when the space starts running short.

Write down what you would give up first if the room cannot hold everything, and what you would not give up under any circumstances.

Trade-offs made calmly in advance are far better than trade-offs made under pressure once drawings exist.

Decide and record whether you want a fitted arrangement or one that can be dismantled and taken with you if the home changes.

Fitted and freestanding lead to entirely different conversations, and the choice is much easier to make before design begins.

Note whether the working arrangement is expected to be settled or provisional, and what would have to change if your pattern of work changed.

A brief written for a settled arrangement looks very different from one written for something deliberately temporary.

Record who in the household has to agree to changes in this room, and whether they have actually read the brief you are preparing.

Late objections from someone who was never consulted are a common reason home working plans stall.

Describe what a good working day in the finished room would feel like, in a few plain sentences, and keep it at the front of the brief.

This is the sentence a designer will read back to you, and it is the easiest thing to lose once technical decisions start.