Shared Home Office Planning Checklist

Write down which days both of you are genuinely working in this room at the same time, rather than the days you both happen to be at home.

Sharing that happens occasionally is a different design problem from sharing that happens every working day, and the answer decides what is worth building.

Note the hours in an ordinary day when both of you are at a desk at once, and the hours when one of you has the room entirely to yourself.

The overlapping hours are the only ones the layout really has to solve; the rest of the day tends to look after itself.

Record which of you was working here first and what changed when the second person arrived, since the room usually still reflects the original arrangement.

Rooms that were adapted rather than replanned keep giving the better position to whoever got there first, which is worth naming openly before a designer does.

Note whether the two of you work for the same organisation or different ones, and whether either of those arrangements is expected to change.

Different employers usually mean different equipment, different meeting patterns and different expectations about privacy inside one room.

Decide and record whether sharing this room is a settled arrangement or something one of you expects to move out of, and say which of you it is.

A settled arrangement can justify fitted work, while a provisional one is usually better served by things that can be moved, reused or taken away.

Write down where the second person goes on the occasions the room cannot hold both of you, and whether that place is genuinely usable for real work.

Almost every shared room needs a fallback, and it works far better chosen calmly in advance than improvised in the middle of a morning.

Compare placing the positions back to back, side by side or facing one another, and write down what each option does to the daylight, the door and the walkway between them.

The three arrangements go wrong differently, and the room itself usually rules out at least one of them before anyone measures anything.

Consider whether you want to be able to see each other while working, and check whether the answer is actually the same for both of you.

One person often wants company in the room and the other wants to face away, and it is far easier to settle that now than after a desk has been made.

Note where the two chairs would come closest, and whether one person could stand up and leave the room without the other having to move first.

Getting in and out is the movement that fails most often when a second position is fitted into a room planned for one occupant.

How much room a chair and a person need in a particular layout is for a qualified professional to assess against the room as it is actually built.

Record which of the two positions gets useful daylight and which does not, and decide openly how that imbalance is going to be handled.

One position is usually better lit than the other, and an unspoken imbalance turns into a running complaint instead of a design decision.

Decide whether the two of you have separate working surfaces or one continuous run, and if it is continuous, record where one person's part ends.

A shared run looks neater on a drawing and needs a clearer agreement in use, because the boundary between the two halves is invisible.

Note what sits behind each position, since one of you will probably have a wall behind you while the other has the door, a window or the rest of the room.

What is behind a person affects both their calls and their sense of being watched, and it rarely falls kindly for both positions at once.

Note how often you both end up on a call at the same moment, and describe plainly what currently happens when it occurs.

This is the event most shared rooms fail at, and counting it is far more useful than estimating how bad it feels.

Record whether the far end of a call can hear the other person in the room talking, and whether either of you has already been asked about it.

Microphones pick up a second voice more readily than people expect, and colleagues often notice it before either worker does.

Discuss whether both of you would genuinely use headphones for every call, and note who would find that unworkable and for what reason.

Agreeing this in advance changes how much acoustic effort the room needs, and one person quietly opting out undoes the whole arrangement.

Agree in writing how each of you signals that a call has started, so the other is not left working it out from a change in tone of voice.

A visible signal removes most of the interruptions that begin inside the room itself, and it asks nothing at all of the building.

Note which conversations genuinely cannot take place with the other person in the room, and write down where those will happen instead.

Any obligation either of you owes an employer about confidential conversations is for a suitably qualified adviser to explain, not something to settle between yourselves.

Record whether one of you speaks noticeably louder on calls than the other, and whether that has already become a source of friction.

Differences in speaking volume are awkward to raise in the moment and much easier to put into a shared brief in advance.

List each person's equipment separately and mark which items were supplied by an employer rather than bought by the household.

Supplied equipment normally has to go back at some point, and knowing whose is whose avoids an unpleasant conversation at exactly the wrong moment.

Ask each employer what they require about the storage, security and eventual return of equipment they supply, and record what they tell you.

Decide which items the two of you are willing to share, such as a printer or a desk lamp, and which each of you needs one of your own.

People usually turn out willing to share fewer things than assumed, and deciding it early prevents a layout built around a generosity nobody actually feels.

Note whether either of you handles paper the other should not read, and record where that paper sits during the working day and overnight.

Whether particular documents may be kept in a shared room at all is for each employer or a suitably qualified adviser to confirm.

Record which leads and chargers belong to which setup, since identical looking cables migrate across a shared room and get blamed for every fault.

Marking them now saves a recurring hunt later, and it also tells a designer how many separate connection points the room really needs.

Decide who gets which drawer, shelf or cupboard, and write the allocation down rather than leaving it to whoever fills the space first.

Storage in a shared room is allocated by habit unless it is allocated deliberately, and habit favours whoever spends more hours in the room.

Agree what state each of you leaves a surface in at the end of the day, and whether the same expectation applies to both of you equally.

Tolerance for clutter is rarely equal between two people, and this is the disagreement most likely to outlast any building work.

Note whether one of you starts noticeably earlier, and what that person has to do in the room while the other is still asleep or elsewhere in the home.

Setting up quietly is a real requirement that affects where things are stored and which door has to be opened first.

Record whether either of you works into the evening, and whether the household expects the room back by then for something else entirely.

An evening claim on the room affects both people, not just the one still working, and it is often left out of the brief.

Note which ordinary sounds carry between the two positions, such as a chair moving, a drawer opening or fast typing on a hard surface.

These are the noises people stop noticing in their own use and never stop noticing in someone else's, so they belong in the brief.

Decide whether food and drink happen at the working positions, and note whether the other person finds that distracting during calls.

It sounds trivial and turns out to matter, particularly in a small room where one person is on camera while the other is having lunch.

Record how often each of you leaves the room during a working session and what for, and note whether the door opening disturbs the other person.

Every trip out of a shared room breaks two people's concentration rather than one, which is why the pattern is worth counting before it is simply tolerated.

Consider whether the two of you take breaks at the same time or at different times, and what the person still working needs while the other is not.

Breaks taken separately mean the room is never fully quiet, which changes what the space has to do more than most people expect.

Record whether the two of you disagree about temperature in this room, and which position feels colder or warmer as the day goes on.

Two people sitting still in one room rarely agree about warmth, and the disagreement usually maps neatly onto where each of them sits.

Adding a second occupant and a second set of equipment changes what a room asks of its heating and ventilation, which the relevant qualified trades must assess.

Note the point in the day when the room starts to feel close or stuffy with both of you in it, and what each of you currently does about it.

The remedy one person reaches for, such as opening a window, is often the thing the other person is trying to avoid.

Decide who controls the window and the blind, since one person's remedy for glare is regularly the other person's draught.

Control of the openings is a genuine source of friction in shared rooms and is easier to agree before either position is fixed.

Note whether the two of you want different light levels at the two positions, and whether the room currently allows that at all.

One overhead fitting serving both positions forces a compromise that neither person chose, which is worth raising early.

Any change to lighting circuits, switching or fixed wiring is for the relevant qualified trade to assess, design and carry out.

Record whether either proposed position would sit hard against a radiator or block it, and raise that with a qualified professional before anything is fixed in place.

Whether a working position can sit near a heat emitter, and what that does to the heating in the room, is for a qualified trade to establish.

Note whether two chairs moving on this floor are heard in the room below, and who is underneath during your working hours.

Two chairs make roughly twice the disturbance of one, and the person below is rarely consulted before the second desk arrives.

Write down that this room now has to serve two complete working setups, and put that in front of a qualified electrician rather than judging it from the existing sockets.

What an existing circuit or socket can serve is for a qualified electrician to assess; never work it out from what appears to be coping at the moment.

Note whether both positions would end up drawing from the same outlet through trailing leads, and raise that arrangement with a qualified trade before the layout is settled.

Where power arrives usually decides where the second position can go, so it is better established before a desk is drawn than after.

Record what happens to the connection when both of you are on video calls at once, and whether one of you routinely has to stop for the other.

This is easy to test on an ordinary working day and tells you whether the problem is the room, the equipment or the connection itself.

Agree in advance whose work takes priority if power or connection becomes unreliable, so it is not negotiated in the middle of somebody's meeting.

Agreeing the rule while nothing is wrong is far easier than agreeing it while one of you is late for a call.

Decide where any shared device such as a printer sits, and note which person has to walk through the other person's space to reach it.

A shared device pulls one person repeatedly across the other person's position, which is obvious on a plan and impossible to ignore in daily use.

Note where the connection enters the home and how far this room is from it, and ask a qualified professional what improving it here would involve.

Two people relying on one connection makes its route through the home matter far more than it did when only one person worked here.

Write down the handful of rules the two of you are already relying on, since unspoken arrangements are the ones that get broken and then resented.

Most of these rules are obvious to whoever set them and invisible to the other person, which is exactly why they fail.

Agree what happens when one of you has someone arriving for work while the other is mid task in the same room.

Whether either of you may receive work visitors at this address is a matter to confirm locally with the relevant authority rather than to assume.

Decide what would prompt the two of you to sit down and reconsider the arrangement, rather than waiting until it has already become an argument.

Naming the trigger in advance makes the conversation a planned one instead of a complaint, which tends to produce better decisions.

Note which parts of any proposal would be difficult to undo if one of you stopped working from home, and keep those parts as few as you can.

Shared arrangements change more often than single ones, so the design benefits from staying reversible wherever it reasonably can.

Record who else in the household is affected by two people working in here, and whether they have been asked about it rather than simply told.

A third person losing the use of a room they had assumed was partly theirs is a common reason these arrangements come apart later on.

Agree how a disagreement about the room gets settled, including who has the final say on something that affects only one of the two positions.

A rule for deciding is more useful than trying to anticipate every decision, particularly in a room neither person fully owns.

Make sure the brief you take to any professional is written by both of you, and mark clearly anywhere the two of you genuinely want different things.

A designer can work with a stated disagreement; what causes trouble is a brief that quietly represents only one of the two people.