"Sometime could you explain what it means when someone describes how many square feet they have. We don't do it in England (probably because our houses are so small) so I have methodically calculated the area of each room in my house. Do people include the bathrooms and the staircases or do they calculate the whole external area and multiply it by the number of floors? Confused English people would like to know. "
I had no idea that the Brits don't normally calculate the square footage of their homes! Another bit of cross-cultural elucidation, courtesy of home exchange.
There are various ways to estimate square footage. In Manhattan it may refer to the total area within the walls of an apartment. This makes a home seem larger because it counts closets, walls, utility area and so on as livable space. People within the apartment will not perceive it that way.
A more honest way to determine the size of a home in square feet is to measure the lenth and width of a room from wall to wall. Those figures are multiplied by each other to find the square footage of the room. This process is repeated for each finished room in the home and the totals are added together.
Note what is NOT included in the total: staircases, closets, attics, basements, garages, boiler rooms and so on.
Home exchange listings for Europe seem to include home size in square meters. I have no idea how European swappers calculate their results, or even how other Americans do it. I am not a construction professional, ymmv.
Take any square footage (or meter) figures as a guideline only. There are exchangers in my own building who have the same apartment floor plan I used to have but they have calculated its size as about half again larger than even the most generous tape measure could compute.
Anyway, as one often hears, it's not how big it is, it's what you do with it. Your space, that is. A well-designed one bedroom apartment can be more beautiful and functional than a poorly laid out or unrenovated house.
And as we all know, the three most important words in real estate, as in home exchange, are "location, location, location", not "size, size, size".
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