I moved out of home when I was 21 years old, and lived alone both as a young adult and again since 2015. My mother has also lived alone since she was in her early 50's, some 40 years ago. When I moved into my current one-bedroom flat, I did not anticipate sharing with anyone. My children had left home, and lived in their own flats, in various parts of the country. But then COVID hit in 2020, and I needed to accommodate my mom for an indefinite time while we waited for her new home to be available. Any alterations to my flat had to be completely reversible, possible to do under the various lockdown regulations (so within our own abilities to move furniture, and redecorate), and we wanted keep the costs to a minimum, as this was a very temporary situation.
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| Original layout of the bedroom and livingroom of my flat |
At the time, I was working from home, giving live lectures and chairing meetings, so it was essential that I could have extended times of complete privacy and quiet. My mom is a very private person, and is a keen knitter - a task which she can do while reading, a feat I have yet to master. She would, however, want to go to and from the kitchen and the bathroom through the day, spend time playing with my cats, and watch television. We would spend time together during breakfast, lunch, dinner and during the evenings, and so while we would live quite separate lives during the day, we also needed common spaces for meals and leisure.
My mom and I both studied architecture, which meant that we had a significant advantage in re-imagining the space. We sat down with a plan of the flat, which has two rooms of similar size, the bedroom 5.5m by 4m and the living room 5.5m by 4.5m. We had access to all of my mother's furniture from the one-bedroom cottage where she had previously lived, but most of this would be stored in my garage until her final move to her new home. We started with a general idea of what each of us needed: my mom wanted a sleeping and dressing area and a sitting area. The seating area would ideally comprise her favourite lounge suite which she had bought in the 1969s and had reupholstered herself on several iterations. Given that she would be spending many hours knitting and reading every day, it was important that she had good light and sun for the sitting area, fortunately easily accommodated with the large north-facing window in one of the two rooms.
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| Layout of the flat (rotated) |
My priority was for a workspace from which I could host Zoom and Teams meetings, and record lectures, which did not obviously reveal my bed and dressing furniture in the background of these calls. For me, natural light was less of a priority, so we envisaged that the slightly larger living room could meet my needs, with its adjacent balcony for a breakaway space and living area. My bed would be positioned behind my desk, with the computer at a height that obscured it. Both rooms had doors that could be closed for privacy and to prevent noise from travelling. In essence, I combined my original bedroom and living room into a single room for myself with my work-from-home desk setup in it, and what had been my bedroom, was temporarily a full living space for my mom. We would be sharing the dining area which doubles up as the entrance hall, as well as the bathroom and kitchen.
After making the selection of mom's furniture, we measured up the rooms and each piece of furniture, which we blocked out on squared paper and cut to their correct shapes. We then draw out the two main rooms and experimented with a number of layouts, keeping in mind other activities that we had planned for our leisure time, such as watching TV and going through my mom's large collection of photographic slides. We imagined that we would alternate between the two rooms each evening, depending on what activities we had planned, or continue to sit at the dining room table or (weather permitting) on the balcony.
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| Layout of the two rooms for me and my mom |
We managed the entire move with only the cost of a small clothes rail, and a double move of her furniture, first to my flat and then a month later when she moved into the new care home. By doing the layouts of the two rooms in advance, we knew exactly where each piece of furniture had to go, so the moving of the larger pieces could be done by the removal company. We also had the help of a friend with a bakkie (a small pickup truck!)
The success of the design can be measured by the fact that we managed to live together for a whole month with a minimum of friction, something that neither of us expected, given our independent and introvert personalities. This also provided a useful transition for mom, as she was to move into a studio flat in the new care home, which we furnished almost identically to the room in my flat that she had occupied.
It was a simple move to restore my flat to its original uses, but the experience told me that it was preferable to keep my workspace in the living room rather than in the bedroom.
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| Workstation in what has been restored as the livingroom |
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