square feet of today's housing?

[lostmymarblesbutfoundthewine]

I'm in the process of house hunting and notice a lot now put the overall square footage.

some I thought looked big are actually tiny square footage and vice versa.

What's the average as they vary wildly. what would you consider small.

assuming you are not the American who whines about tiny UK houses...

average is meaningless. Measurements don't lie if they are accurate. The EPC gives the area of the house if the details don't.

room sizes and number of rooms matter. Recently saw an ad for a huge house but it is badly designed and includes a lightwell. Adds to the area but inaccessible!

Hahaha no. I've been America once if that counts.

The average will differ wildly depending on they type of house, number of bedrooms, etc that you are looking for.

What I did was set up a simple spreadsheet (I know, I know ) of the houses in my criteria that I wanted to view and had a column for the square footage. This gave me an idea of where on the scale they were in my particular search.

It also helped to give me an idea of what 800 or 1600 square feet "felt" like when I viewed as the numbers alone didn't really mean anything to me!

Our last house, a 3 bed semi (Victorian), had a much bigger square footage than my SIL's new build 5 bed executive detached house. You could only fit a double bed in 2 of the bedrooms and in one of those there is no room for any furniture other than 2 bedside tables.

We have recently moved from a house that was 78m2 (840 sq ft) to one that is 91m2 (980 sq ft). We have really noticed the difference even though 13m2 doesn't sound that much. We have an extra bedroom and although we've lost a couple of feet off the lounge we now have an extra room open plan to the kitchen diner which works so well for our family. By using space more cleverly and because of the rooms being set off a hallway rather than going jnto one another, the overall effect is a much more spacious home.

Also the garden isn't factored into the measurements and with DCs especially that's really important. Our new garden is 4 times the size of the old one.

We've gained a lot for £37500 extra!

Both houses were well below average in their respective categories (3 bed detached/4 bed detached respectively) but I really don't know what we'd do with any more space!

ETA 2 double bedrooms and a box room is absolutely standard around here (mostly 30s and 40s homes in an industrial town) with the box room usually being c.7 x 7 ft. I've seen new build homes where beds have to be specially made to fit in the bedroom, or can only fit one way with no additional furniture. How is that even a bedroom?!

I'm so glad they've started displaying these measurements, our current house was a new build so we only had measurements and a show home to go on really when making the decision.

Ours is
834 sq ft, not including conservatory, and the properties we are considering now are between 1150 - 1700 sq ft, so quite a lot bigger. Its nice to be able to compare, basically we've not even considered anything below 950 sq ft as we know it wont be any bigger than we have now. Though of course room layout makes a lot of difference.

I wish they would put garden measurements too, they only seem to include garden size if we're talking acres!

It's definitely helpful as are the floor plans. Layout can make all the difference.

We previously lived in a small new build but would really struggle to do that now having had masses of space in this house. What each person considers small really depends on what they are used to.

There isn't a lot of older housing where I live, most of it is post war. But I've noticed that where the 1960s and 70s semi detached houses have two decent double bedrooms with one small bedroom, there seems to be a trend in houses built recently to have four bedrooms, but three of them are tiny and the fourth is only a small double.

I used to work in a job where I was constantly looking at house surveys and from what I could see, the 'average' semi seemed to be between 850 sq ft and 950 sq ft. A very small one might have been 750 sq ft.

The measurements are useful to an extent but I agree with a previous poster that they can be misleading too. My parents house is probably about 2000 sq ft, it's really in theory quite a decent size, but about a third of that is wasted space due to a poor design, so although it's quite big, it really feels quite small.

Thank you. I've noticed a few on right move have started listing the size. I'm used to large terraced houses and as someone said before the big executive homes are actually smaller but more rooms

You can usually see the square footage on the EPC. I became slightly obsessed when we were house hunting!

In 1980, the then Conservative government abolished the previous standards which were intended to give adequate space in homes, and had been enforced in Social Housing. Since then, the building trade has tricked homebuyers by describing houses in numbers of bedrooms (and sometimes bathrooms) which has led to every decreasing room sizes.

When standards assured adequate size, it was perfectly reasonable to grade houses by number of rooms.

It is a jolly good thing that buyers are now seeing floor space measurements of houses they are thinking of buying or building, and I hope that buyers will concentrate more on size.

Interesting! I wondered whether the depressing trend of labelling a room as an 'open plan kitchen living space' when actually it is a smallish living room with a wall of kitchen units jammed at one end (and of course thus adding an extra bedroom) had any basis in rule or regulation - seems it might do.

My favourite one was a flat the exact same as mine, which is a 600 sq ft ish 2 bed. Advertised as a 4 bed, I was deeply curious as to how they'd done it and went for a viewing.

Aside from the aforementioned kitchen in living room trick, they'd also erected, in the middle of the living room, bisecting a window, a 'fourth bedroom/study'.

Said living room is biggish. But it is, needless to say, not big enough to function as a kitchen, living room and fourth ruddy bedroom. Not to mention that it made for a deeply odd layout.

Think it sold for about 300k. Am always tempted to go and knock on the door and ask if they got rid of the 'fourth bedroom'. It did appear to be made out of plasterboard and gaffer tape, so probably not that tricky to demolish.

It depends on a lot of other things too lie ceiling height and how many stairs A bungalow with less square footage may have more actual useable space as less waste on stairs and landings etc. I viewed 2 flats recently and the one on one level feels huge compared to the one with stairs just in terms of what can be fitted in the rooms

I've seen them varying between 800 and 1500.

I'm getting a little obsessive just looking at those facts in right move and not the other features of the property

I have just put my house on the market - 1653 sf :)

We are in the process of buying a house which we're very happy with size wise just by looking at it. Was even more pleased when I looked at the details and saw it was pretty much the same sq footage as where we currently live (so good for overall same amount of space for furniture / stuff). Until I noticed that they had included the garage in the sq footage....sneaky! Doesn't make much difference to us now but if it's important to you make sure you check what they've included in the measurements!

When house hunting last year sq footage was an important criteria. We were living in 800 sq ft, so we knew that 1200 is the absolute minimum we need while 1400 was ideal. We ended up buying 1700 as it came with a converted loft of 300 sq ft. We are a family of 4. So on average (although this is a rubbish calculation) you could say 300-350 sq feet per person is a decent living space.

I agree that it's important yo know sq footage/meterage when house hunting....having a floorplan is really essential imho as I like to plan where we'll site our masses of furniture.

In the past I've also used spreadsheets to compare criteria of potential purchases and overall size has been one of the most important factors for me.

I guess we were spoiled because we were extremely fortunate to buy a 3500 sq ft Victorian house a few years back, which had humungous rooms and that has always been the benchmark by which we've measured future purchases!

We're not fans of new builds anyway as our style is traditional Arts & Crafts, but even if we were, we would be discouraged by the overall lack of space many new build rooms provide - I'd rather less rooms but larger ones if I had to choose.....

Our current house was a downsize for us at 2000 sq ft, compared to the one we just sold (2500) and for DH and me that's about as small as we'd want to go - we run a business from home and have two bouncy dogs, plus we like our own space for chilling out and despite a cull we still have six sofas so many of the properties we viewed on RM were ruled out as being way too tiny for our stuff us.

Mind you, I'm a firm believer in playing around with rooms and not necessarily using them for the purpose they were intended - for example we've opted to use the master bedroom here as an upstairs 'snug' because it has great views from a cosy window seat - perfect TV room material!

I wish they'd also include garden measurements - our last house had 1/3 acre but we had no idea of this till we turned up to view - if we'd listened to the EA we might never have viewed this house as the EA told us on the phone the garden was small, when it's actually in excess of 100' x 60' which for this area is fairly large......

to, not yo - blooming autocorrect!

We started off in a largish 1 bed flat at 600sqft
Then moved to a 2 bed cottage at 650sqft.

We have just recently moved to another 2 bed cottage but which is 900sqft.

I think it's huge (fm for just the two of us plus dog) but DH thinks it's still a bit small for him.
However this gives us 2 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms, one of which is huge, a large sitting room and a kitchen big enough for a full sized dining table plus large utility room.
Don't see the need to have more space and love living in a cottage.

Friends have 3 and 4 bed houses built about 40 years ago which are about the same sqft as ours

3500 ft. wow not jealous in the slightest

3500 ft. wow not jealous in the slightest

Yes, we still miss that house tbh, lostmymarbles, but selling it enabled us to pay off our debts and be mortgage-free at an early age. It was too big though - all very well if you've got lots of DC but we only ever had the one.....