How do I calculate the area of my house? I’ve got two finished floors, plus an unfinished attic, plus a basement, plus an enclosed patio. Do I include the unfinished areas? Do I include closets? Do I include the area of walls? Can I just measure the outside of the house?
Typically, it’s just the heated/cooled areas. So, if you’re like most people, your patio and attic won’t count. Whether or not your basement does depends on if it’s heated and cooled, or if it’s just an unfinished room.
-Joe
It’s normally the area that is conditioned and finished, based on floor upon which you can walk–closet or room.
You can see that such a vague description leaves a lot of margin, and so you want to skew it depending on whether you are having the house cleaned, getting it assessed for taxes, or selling the sucker.
You can reasonably use outside dimensions, especially if the rooms are very irregular.
This approach does not easily reflect volume, quasi-conditioned areas such as an enclosed patio, basement, and the like.
As **Chief Pedant ** alludes to, what’s your purpose? If for taxes, your local law will have specifics that could be very inclusive or very exclusive of the various sorts of area. Tthat’s also something you’ll want to get right; Mr. Taxman reacts badly to being short-changed.
If it’s for real estate sales or just neighborhood bragging rights, the best source of info is a local real estate agent. They’ll have a pretty good handle on local practice, unwriteen and informal though it probably is.
This is excellent advice. There are specific laws and rules that can vary between jurisdictions, and you should make sure that you can arrive at the appropriate figure for the purpose in your jurisdiction.
For example, I once worked in a city tax assessor’s office. In our jurisdiction, the law said that “floor space area” for tax purposes was considered to be any habitable floor above grade–in other words, you did not consider the basement. So if you were working on the assessment of “a 1200 sf* house,” you knew that that 1200 sf did not include the basement. Whether the basement was heated or finished didn’t matter; the basement wasn’t included. The basement (and attic and garage and lot area and other factors) would be included somehow in the final tax calculation, but would not be included in the total floor space area. Weird maybe, but that was how things were done in our jurisdiction for tax purposes. Your jurisdiction will probably vary.
This is why you should check your local laws and regulations–because rules can differ, and they can seem illogical. And for local practice in general, a real estate agent is a good resource, as LSLGuy says.
sf = our office shorthand for “square feet.” We also used a symbol that is unavailable here, so I’ll just use “sf.”