If you’re selling your home or thinking of buying, one theory that’s imperative to understand is how to calculate square feet. Having to execute a square footage computation may be giving you panicked thoughts about being late to homeroom, but there’s a huge difference between a home that’s 400 square feet (very small) and one that’s 4,000 (McMansion), and not merely in conditions of how much space you need to stretch your legs.
A home’s square footage is a crucial element in determining the price tag on a home you’re aiming to buy or sell, how much you’ll pay in taxes if your home is there, and what varieties of renovations are possible in your future. Plus, a home’s square footage can be astonishingly subjective.
Since most people don’t have a square foot calculator in their back pocket, some tips about what you need to know to ace any square footage calculations that appear in your future.
How exactly to calculate square feet
You probably learn how to calculate the square footage of a straightforward room without any funny shapes. Just break out your measuring tape-or a laser beam measure-to get its length and width. Increase the width by the space and voila! You could have the square footage. Say an area is 20 feet wide by 13 legs long, then 20 x 13 = 260 square foot.
How to find square feetHow exactly to calculate the square footage of a whole home
While measuring an individual room is not any big package, people get kind of intimidated as it pertains to calculating the square footage of a whole home. While homes can primarily appear “daunting to solution, they’re simply a assortment of small boxes,” says Mario Mazzamuto of SF Bay Appraisal. Don’t sweating it if an area comes with an outcropping. Simply rest that area down into a smaller pack, and measure each box separately. Add up each box’s square footage to find the room’s total area. So if your living room, bedroom, bathroom, and hallway are 500, 400, 200, and 100 square toes respectively, that means the full total is 500 + 400 + 200 + 100 = 1,200 square legs total.
Even complicated floor plans are only a series of rectangles you can add up.
If you have a circular kitchen and a triangular rumpus room, fear not. Just check out vCalc’s useful calculator that will tell you how to calculate square feet regardless of what polygon’s thrown your way. Once you select a condition, the calculator will prompt you for the measurements needed to compute square footage.
Take the square foot calculation with a grain of salt
Now that you understand how to calculate the square footage of your home, it’s time to bust your bubble with a big caveat: A square footage computation is surprisingly subjective based on who’s doing the measuring. For example, you measured the actual, livable square footage between your interior walls. But many architects use their own square ft . computation method, measuring the square footage from the exterior walls.
This explains why there are often discrepancies in the middle of your square foot calculations and the ones of an agent, builder, or other sources.
