Choosing a quiet spot for a home office

The quietest spot for a home office is usually an interior room, away from the street, the kitchen, the bathroom and the front door. That rule of thumb is a useful start, but the best room depends on the noise your particular house makes. That is easiest to learn by testing candidate rooms at the hours you will work, not on a quiet weekend afternoon.

Choose two or three candidate rooms and treat the choice as a trial. The method below spreads over about two weeks and costs nothing. It also avoids the common mistake of picking a room because it has the best light or the most floor space.

Walk through each room at working hours

Visit each candidate at the time you plan to work. Stand in the middle of the room for a couple of minutes with the windows closed, then with them open. Repeat with the heating or air conditioning running and then switched off. Listen for traffic, voices from neighboring rooms, the refrigerator, a water heater, a washing machine, children, a television or a neighbor's voice through the wall. Write down what you hear and roughly how often. A short written log with times is more useful than a general impression, because the sounds that matter often come in bursts.

A phone app that shows sound levels gives a rough reading. Treat the numbers as a way to compare rooms with each other rather than as precise measurements, and keep the phone in the same place for each visit so the comparison is fair.

Stand where the desk will be, not in the doorway. Sound levels differ within a single room, and a spot close to a window can sound very different from one in the far corner. Listen while facing the direction you will face the screen, because that is where the sound will reach you during a working day.

Check what is on the other side of each wall

Note what sits behind every shared wall. Kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms and stairwells generate sound that travels readily. Plumbing inside a shared wall can knock or gurgle when faucets run, and a room beside a living room with a television will be harder to work in than one beside a hallway. Rooms above a kitchen or a garage pick up airborne noise from below, along with vibration from appliances and from a garage door opening and closing. In an apartment, duplex or townhouse, a wall shared with a neighbor's living room matters more than one shared with an empty room.

Think also about the shared spaces you cannot see from the room. Bathroom exhaust fans, a shared stairwell and a neighbor's yard can carry sound a long way. A room beside a stairwell picks up voices from every floor, and a room with a wall shared with a bathroom may hear the flush and the fan each time someone uses it.

Also note the exterior walls. A room facing a busy road takes in traffic, and a room facing a playground or a school takes in calls and shouts at certain times of day. Rooms directly below an occupied upper floor can pick up footsteps and furniture moved overhead, and ground-floor rooms near the front door pick up deliveries and the doorbell.

Judge the room's position and layout

Rooms with fewer exterior walls are usually calmer, and a room on the side of the house away from the street generally has an advantage. Avoid a room whose door opens onto the main entry hall or the route to the kitchen, because that door will be opened and closed all day and footsteps pass the threshold. Keep the desk away from air vents and ducts, where airflow and the fan noise of the heating system are louder. If a room has a window onto a play area or a parking spot, consider when that area is busiest.

Practical needs matter too. Check that the room has enough power outlets, a reliable connection to the internet router and enough space for the desk and chair without crowding. A spot that is quiet but has a weak signal or no outlet will cause problems later.

Test the chosen spot before committing

Once you have a favorite, use it for at least a week, which is the final stage of the method, before the desk is fixed in place. Hold a short test call, record it and play it back on headphones. Listen for background hum, traffic, echo and the sound of other people. Ask whoever you share the house with to carry on as usual during the test, so you see the real conditions rather than a tidied-up version. If the room is still too noisy, switch to your second candidate, which you have already tested.

If the best room is only partly suitable, small changes can close the gap before you commit. A rug, a door seal and a bookcase on the shared wall are inexpensive and easy to reverse, so you can test each one's effect before spending more. Note the result of each change in the same log you used for the original sounds, so the comparison stays honest.

The best spot is rarely the one with the best view. It is the room where the noise you actually face is least, and that is usually found by a little patient listening. A short test costs far less than moving a desk and furniture after a month of frustrating calls.