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.

There are 3 and 4 bed newbuilds with little more square footage than my 2 up 2 down with a modest extension for the kitchen.

I think it needs to be a compulsory part of listings.

850sq ft, btw. 2 good sized bedrooms, downstairs rooms knocked into a through lounge, with a chunk taken out for the bathroom, and kitchen tacked on the back.

Have been looking at 3 bed houses, since the boys need their own rooms. 3rd bedroom is so often a box room, master bedroom not big enough for a kingsize bed and kitchen smaller than the one we have, which is too small for me.

We are going from 500 to 2200 sq ft. It's my goldilocks spot, just right. I appreciate uk homes are on the small size, and ours is probably substantial for London.

I've tried living in bigger houses, but I didn't enjoy it as it just felt redundant for the two of us. No mansions for me, can't get them cosy enough.

We used to rent a 2000sq ft 4 bed detached, and have recently bought a 1400 sq ft 4 bed townhouse. I did think it would feel smaller than the house we rented, but the space in our owned house has been used so much better than the rented house, we haven't actually lost any useful space. All the bedrooms are bigger, so is the house bathroom, and we have a big (for us) kitchen. The only room that's smaller is the living room. When I've looked at the floor plan for the rented house, about 200 sq ft was hallway, and then the rest was a conservatory we never used, plus the garage which was included in the footage.
I do really like when sq ft is included in house descriptions, but always find the floor plan as (if not more) useful to see how the space has actually been used. We didn't bother to look at houses that seemed to have decent sq ft but had huge hallways and landings as it massively cut down the usable living space.

It really is all about layout. Our house is large (4500 square feet) but due to the way it is laid out the space is all well used. If we had lots of smaller rooms I'm sure we wouldn't go into half of them.

Bizarrely the playroom is probably the least used room but that's because the DSs insist on spreading lego out into every single room in the house.