The best place to start estimating the home size your need is your current rental. Most people would look to exceed the size of their current rental when buying a house.

• Square footage

  • Square footage of houses is well-defined as “livable area”. This EXCLUDES garage, unfinished basements, and patios and balconies.
  • Square footage of apartments on the other hand is very vague. Most apartments will measure ‘total usable area’. This includes balconies if any, and sometimes even hallway space that is considered usable by the apartment.

  So almost all the time, a 1000sq ft house will be larger than a 1000sq ft apartment. But using the given size of your apartment is a good enough place to start filtering houses.

• Bathrooms

  Bathrooms consist of 4 factors:

  • Sink/Basin
  • Toilet
  • Shower
  • Tub

  If a bathroom has all 4 of them, it is considered a ‘full bath’. If it has 2 of those, it's a half-bath and so on.

  A 3/4th bathroom is usually missing a tub. But not all 1/2 baths are the same, depending on which fixtures are part of it. 🤷

• Bedrooms:

  A room that can be classified as a bedroom needs to have a closable door and in-wall storage space (typically a closet)

  So a 2 bedroom home may have more rooms that do not qualify as bedrooms.