I can’t tell you the square footage of my house, but it’s a four-bedroom house and there’s only the two of us living here.
It’s worked out well, because I moved out of the marital bed into my own bedroom - one of the spare rooms. One of the other rooms is the computer room, and one is for storage.
Same here, minus the cat. I never use my living room; it might as well not be there.
Interesting. I have a 1040sf house and I always wonder how the neighbors next door (with the same house) get by with the two parents and two boys.
Granted, they do have a finished basement, so they technically have more than 1040 but half of the basement is a hair studio.
I grew up in a house with two kids that was about 1100sf BUT we had large addition put on by the time I was 12. The neighbors have a slightly bigger master bedroom now but they’re all still crammed in there and the boys are in their mid-20s. I guess that’s why they’re always outside 
It’s just me upstairs here in my 1040sf and I probably could shave off some space and still be just fine. But now there are little kids around and stuff, I need more room to entertain in the winter. This winter I’ll be doing more in the basement, once I kick my tenant out.
Before I bought this house, when my older son and two of his friends were living with us, we had 3 teenagers, 2 little kids, and 2 adults (and SEVEN dogs) in a house about this size. We did use a room in the basement, so technically it was sort of a 4 bedroom, but it was still busy.
I loved it. Never had more fun in my life than when I had 5 kids in the house. When you have that many people, no matter what you cook, someone will be thrilled with it…and I do love to cook.
I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, but I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life where we don’t have basements. I have been in homes in other parts of the country that have basements, some of them finished, and I find it perplexing that people don’t include their basements in the square footage of the house since it seems to me to be VERY usable living space.
Would someone mind explaining the logic to a furriner like me? 
Living by myself, probably around 900 sf to feel comfortable. I’m living in a ~400 sf apartment now, by myself, and it is too small once all of my stuff is in it.
On the other hand, my condo in Orlando is 1000 sf, and it was plenty big enough. The master bedroom could have even been smaller and I’d still feel like I had plenty of space. But when the second bedroom was totally ruined by the hurricanes of 2004, it definitely felt smaller.
When I was living in an apartment near UCF, it was around 600+ sf and toward the end of my living there it started feeling small for all my stuff. So the magic number for my current amount of belongings is around 900 sf I guess.
Ideally, if the cost of the house, maintenance, and climate control was no objective, I’d prefer around 3000 sf. That way I can have plenty of room for guests and storage, but it still wouldn’t be so big that it felt empty.
The 6 of us (me, wife, and 4 kids between 6 and 1) currently live in a 1600 sqft 3-bedroom house house with no basement. It’s getting insanely cramped and there’s really no storage space, no guest room, no office. It was fine when it was just 3 of us, but 6 is too many.
Which is why we’re moving to a 4-bedroom 2500 sq ft house with a full finished basement, real master suite, and quasi-fifth bedroom in the basement, with ample storage space.
I like having different rooms. Tv in the living room, computer in the office, read in the bedroom. Eat in the kitchen’s small nook.
1400 sq ft is plenty.
I don’t miss my small apartment days at all.
It depends - but some don’t include it in the square footage based on coding - there has to be x amount of windows, x amount of exit/entrances, etc.
Also, if you include it in the square footage - they can find a way to tax you on the square footage.
additional hijack sidenote: There’s also taxes based on other factors: I found out from the realtor that there was some regional law that based the taxes on the distance from the ground to the roof in the front. So one builder decided to build a more tax-efficient house by just extending the front roof down so you’d only get taxed for a single story building
My bf told me that in Cairo builders would have additional unfinished posts on the roof of a completely finished building (as if they were going to add another level). This was to save on taxes since they wouldn’t tax on an unfinished building.
My family (two adults, two children) just moved from a 900 sq ft, 2 bd/2 ba apartment. We only felt cramped when my mother-in-law and her sister came to visit us for 6(!) weeks. We had a ton of storage, which helped us keep everything uncluttered.
We just bought an 1800 sq ft, 3 bd/2.5 ba house with a huge backyard. It feels enormous. I don’t see us moving from there until we’re ready to retire.
Aha! Knew it. The last post on that was less than 2 months ago.
Yeah “legally” my unfinished basement is not living space. It only becomes a ‘bedroom’ if there is a window in it that a person can escape through. A bathroom down there would technically count as a bathroom I believe. If it was finished with drywall I think it would count as sq ft living space too.
My roommate/tenant’s 200+ square foot “bedroom” with brick walls, tiny windows and concrete floor is neither legally a bedroom nor living space. It’s no different than if he lived in my garage.
I live in a 600 sq. ft. apartment that is part of the kitchen/servants quarters of a large Victorian. A large (non-functional) iron cookstove dominates my main living area. I use the ovens for storage. The apartment is two stories, and I have off-street parking and a large private garden/patio space, which is almost unheard of in Somerville. The only problem is storage space, I am thinking about buying a garden shed to store my bike, so I don’t have to haul it out from under the stairs every time I want to ride it.
My family of 3, soon to be 4 (plus 4 cats) live in a 2 bedroom 1 bathroom single fronted house - roughly 600 sq ft - something like this. Ideally we’d be in a 3-4 bedroom house with an extra bathroom, but generally we find the living space reasonable. I’m sure when the kids get bigger having an extra family room for them would be great, but that’s our 10 year plan right now.
Japanese living spaces are universally small. My current place is just under 70 m^2, so about 750 ft^2. It’s just about right space-wise, though the layout sucks. We don’t get enough light and there are a couple of dead spaces that don’t really work for any use and are effectively wasted space. There’s a ton of storage, but a lot of it is in the form of cabinets over the doorways, which makes for claustrophobic feelings going in and out of the rooms. With better layout, this would be an absolutely awesome place.
We’re moving because it’s a bit old, it’s on the fourth floor with no elevator, and we’ve had some pest problems. We have a 10 month old boy and the recent rat incursion, and probable roach problem in the summer again, made my wife uncomfortable enough that we made a solid decision to move.
The new place has a better layout, but it’s small enough that we’re going to have to make some changes to how we live when we move. It’s about 56 m^2, so under 600 ft^2, and some of our things, like our bed, are too big to fit comfortably. We’re probably going to switch to futon and a very low convertible slat platform instead of a bed.
It’s probably going to be a bit too small for us after a pretty short time, but that’s actually a good thing in a way. We are planning to move to the US soon (I would have liked to move this year, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to be possible) and we need to minimize our belongings. It will be livable, but also slightly uncomfortable, so that we’re more motivated to get the hell out when we planned to.
We’d both really love to build our own place eventually, after we move to the US. Neither of us likes huge places, but we’d probably want something bigger than possible in Japan. I’m thinking 3 bedrooms, 1.5 or 2 bathrooms, medium-large living room, nice sensible but spacious layout, probably around 1200–1500 ft^2, based on pictures I’ve seen of some nicely-designed places. I really liked a lot of the homes in The Green House both from a visual design perspective and the ideas for making a home with low energy needs.
My sister’s McMansion in Oakdale is fucking huge, and ugly. Neither one of us wants to live in a place like that, no matter how visually impressive it is.
We’ve got about 1500 sqare feet right now (2 bedroom + den, 2 bathroom), which is plenty for us, though I wish we had more storage space; other than the closets, we just have a teeny storage locker in the basement, which doesn’t fit the bikes (they are sitting out next to the storage lockers). The living space is good for us, and we use all of it every day (we are both insomniacs, so whoever can’t sleep gets up and eventually ends up sleeping in the spare bedroom). When we had his whole family staying here for Christmas, it was a tad tight, but we managed.
I would love a 2400 sqaure foot house.
As a single person, I lived in an 800 square foot apartment and was very happy with the space. It was just right for me. Later, I bought a 1700 square foot house, and while I enjoyed the big open living area, there were two bedrooms I never went into. It was too much space.
Now I’m married with a kid. Our house is 2100 square feet and just right… we regularly use every square inch of the place.
My household currently has 6 people living in 1200 sq. feet of space. It’s a big improvement over our previous 850 sq. feet, but still is noisy, cluttered, and crowded, mostly because of poor layout and lack of storage. I don’t necessarily want a really big house, but something around 2500 sq. feet would feel better.