I’m a floorplan novice. How do I figure out the square footage of an apartment?
There’s a lot on this site about floorplans — you can cruise around and find my quotes in the Times about this subject — but the main thing to realize is that you’re not buying a floorplan. You’re buying an apartment, and all a floorplan is meant to do is to be a tool for thinking about the apartment.
To that end, you’ll want to compare the sizes of different apartments, and you may be noticing that the published square footage isn’t always . . . reliable.
So the first thing to do is to check the footprint of the apartment. If the apartment is a box that’s roughly 20 feet by 50 feet, it’s okay to start with a square footage approximation of 1,000 square feet.
How do you figure out how long and wide and apartment is? Well, until you get me or an appraiser in there with a laser tape, you just add up the dimensions on the floorplan. It will help you to know:
* a standard bathtub length is five feet;
* the standard width for a galley kitchen with counters on both sides is eight feet;
* the distance from the outside edge of a hanger to the back wall of a closet is two feet.
Happy shopping!