It's tough when we picture ourselves moving into a bright, open airy apartment only to realize our budget plus lifestyle plus stuff may lead us to cramped and dark spaces. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Square footage is tricky. Getting the right place is not always about the size of the rooms but their shape. And when you're apartment hunting, keep in mind that a furnished room will actually look larger than an empty one because your brain gets a variety of things to focus on.
You do have control over how much space you need — ease your mind by measuring your rooms as well as the size of the things you intend to bring with you to answer the question, "How much square footage do I need?"
Pretty easy math: Get out your trusty measuring tape to find a room's length and width. Then, multiply those two numbers.
But if the room isn't a nice, neat square or rectangle, and it's got some outcroppings and jogs, you'll have to get creative. Swallow your horror, realize you'll never have to go back there and channel your inner ninth grader: Divide the room into squares or rectangles. Add all the bits and bobs together to get the size of the entire space.
Or do the math on a calculator like this one at Calculator Soup, in which you can put in the room's shape, even if it doesn't have corners. It also can calculate price per square foot if you need that. And, because it is 2021, you can find a laser measure app on your smartphone.
If you're apartment hunting and just need a ballpark, use your stride. The average stride is about five feet, but that depends on so many things including height, age, terrain. Or you can also look up your shoe size and how many inches that is; e.g., a women's 8 is about 9 feet 5 inches, a men's 10 is about 10 feet 6 inches. Keep that number in your back pocket when you're out and about.
According to Realtor.com, when appraisers look at a residence, they measure everything in a house or apartment — living areas as well as non-living areas such as unfinished basements, attics — because an appraiser is looking for the total value of a home.
For your purposes as a renter or buyer, you're likely interested in whether your bed will fit in a bedroom and if that baby grand has got to find a new home. You want to know the square footage of the living spaces — bedrooms (and closets), bathrooms, hallways, kitchen, enclosed patios and finished attics.
A normal-sized school bus is about 300 square feet, but it is difficult to really visualize how that might play out in an apartment. Click on this video to see how one couple converted an old school bus into a home. In fact, it's 36 feet long by 8 feet wide, giving the owners about 266 square feet of living space.
You can actually do quite a lot of living in 300 square feet. The “schoolie" owners have a living room, galley kitchen (with a full-size fridge and lots of storage), bathroom with full-size shower, “hall" closet, vanity area, and a bedroom roomy enough for a queen-size bed.
Your basic two-car garage is about 20 feet by 24 feet or 480 square feet. A garage made into an apartment is a nice roomy space.
In this amount of space, you can really have a pared-down version of a larger home, including a separate kitchen instead of a kitchenette.
Even if you never watched The West Wing TV series, you're probably familiar with the Oval Office, the U.S. President's office in the West Wing of the White House. Although not a traditional shape, that office is 816 square feet. There is a ton you can do in that amount of square footage. There is likely room for more than one bedroom, or a bedroom and a home office — your very own West Wing.
Imagine five bowling lanes side by side and you get a sense of how big 1,000 square feet is.
Many mid-century ranch houses clocked in at around this size. They were often built with the kitchen, dining and living room at one end of the house and the bedrooms at the other, running about 22 feet wide by 48 feet long (1,056 square feet).
Maybe it was hard to tell from your couch, but Friends' Monica and Rachel's two-bedroom, one-bathroom West Village apartment is an estimated 1,125 and 1,500 square feet. Supposedly the apartment was a hand-me-down rent-controlled place for only $200 a month (a unicorn!).
Today, an apartment that size with two bedrooms and two bathrooms in NYC rents for more than $5,600 a month.
Got a baseball team's worth of big horses? They'd have to live in nine, 12 foot by 14-foot stalls, or 1,512 square feet of space.
Back in 1970, 1,500 square feet was the size of the average U.S. home. That number has nearly tripled since then. In that amount of space you can fit three bedrooms and two bathrooms.
If you've ever played singles tennis, you and your opponent were running around in about 2,106 square feet of space.
Though still smaller than the median-size newly built home, which comes in at 2,333 square feet, something with 2,000 square feet of living space is substantial. Homes this size have an average living room size of about 319 square feet.
There are larger bedrooms, closets, bathrooms and hallways. More kitchen space, more storage. Just more of everything.
Although there are couples raising children in tiny homes under 500 square feet, for the basics — enough space to eat, sleep and wash — you want about 200 to 400 square feet per person.
But it's not just about square footage. You also need to consider a room's shape. For example, a queen-size bed needs a 12-foot by 14-foot room (168 square feet), and a California king needs one that's 14-feet by 12-feet — same square footage but different shape.
When you're looking for a place to live that's the right size for you, keep in mind three things: lifestyle, budget, your stuff. You want to find that Goldilocks spot that has enough room for all the things you need to live your best life.
Before moving: measure twice, curate once.
Stacey Freed is an award-winning writer and former senior editor for Remodeling, a trade publication focused on the business of the remodeling and construction industry. As an independent writer, she continues to write about the building, design, architecture and housing industries. Her work has appeared in Better Homes and Gardens and USA Today special interest publications, Realtor magazine, This Old House, Professional Builder and online at AARP, Forbes.com, House Logic and Sweeten.com among other places.