In 2008, One Week was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

A rejected suitor secretly renumbers packing crates, and the result is a lopsided structure with revolving walls, kitchen fixtures on the exterior, and upper-floor doors that open onto thin air.

One Week was likely inspired by Home Made, an educational short film produced by the Ford Motor Company in 1919 to promote prefabricated housing.

Keaton used numerous elements seen in the film, including "the wedding, the Model T and the use of the pages from a daily calendar to show the house being built in one week" in his comic parody.

[3] Years later, Keaton told an interviewer that the film's title is a play on Three Weeks, a notorious 1907 sex novel by Elinor Glyn.

Knopf notes that One Week is Keaton's first attempt to move away from a plot-driven narrative, as he employed in his earlier film The High Sign, toward mining more and more gags from a few basic elements—in this case, the house and ladders.

[6] According to Eleanor Keaton, Buster originally thought to combine two of his two-reel films, One Week and The Boat (1921), into a four-reeler charting a young couple's adventures.

His physical trainer gave him both hot and cold showers and then treated the swelling with olive oil and horse liniment.

She drops a bar of soap out of the tub and waits until (as a fourth wall-breaking gag) someone's hand is placed over the camera lens so she can lean out and retrieve it.

[17] The Santa Clarita Valley Signal wrote: "If Buster Keaton in 'One Week' broke loose in a museum he'd tickle the mummies to life again.