How many square feet does your house have? No, not the kind that would fit in square shoes.
Is it 1,500 square feet? 2,000? 3,000? Do you know? Should you know?
Should you care?
Are you like the suburban woman who complained to her local board of Realtors that she was sold a 4,100-square-foot house and later found it was more than 1,000 square feet smaller?
Is that like buying a German shepherd and discovering two months later it`s a cocker spaniel? Or can a house look as if it has 4,000 square feet when it only has 3,000?
When applied to homes, the whole concept of square footage can get so confusing that it drives people crazy, said Laura Staines, a principal with the Philadelphia-based Martin Organization, one of the nation`s leading residential architecture firms.
Builders, for instance, may use different methods of calculating the square footage of a house, so that two houses with exactly the same floor plans might be listed with quite different square-foot sizes, she said.
And even when the measurements are comparable, the two houses may differ radically in livability, quality of materials, construction and amenities, so a comparison that emphasizes square footage could be misleading.
Builder measurements are subject to all kinds of variations. ”Some include the garage and some don`t,” said Staines. ”Some include a finished basement and some do not.”
Al Bloom, a partner with the Oakbrook Terrace-based architecture firm of Bloom and Fiorino, said his company`s practice is to use measurements from the outer edge of the exterior walls, but include only rooms that have
”conditioned air space,” that is, rooms that are heated or cooled.
”A lot of builders do it differently,” he said. For instance, some measure from the inside of the exterior walls, which in a large house with brick facing could create a difference of 30 or 40 square feet, he said.
He said in his experience a finished walkout or English basement – one with substantial above-ground window space – might be figured in. In that case, a builder`s brochure will usually mention that the basement is being included, he said.
Some builders include a window seat area in a bay window in their calculations, according to Buffalo Grove-based architect Matthias Jans. ”They say you can sit in it, so it counts,” Jans said. ”Builders get very creative.”
Perhaps the greatest confusion today among both consumers and those in the home building industry stems from the incorporation of what is called
”volume space” into a home.
Volume space, in the form of cathedral or otherise articulated ceilings, two-story foyers and family rooms, has been an overwhelming trend in residential building since the mid-1980s.
Such volume up to now hasn`t generally been included in square footage tabulations, but many builders express the feeling it should be recognized somehow.
”An elevated ceiling costs more to build than a flat eight-foot ceiling, but technically the square footage doesn`t change,” said William Maybrook, sales and marketing vice president of Lexington Homes, one of the area`s two biggest locally based builders.
”If a home has 2,000 square feet in it, it could clearly live like 2,500 square feet because of volume,” he said. ”But we don`t quote that figure, nor will you find it on a blueprint.”
Some builders, in fact, are starting to give square-footage figures that take volume into account, and typically add 50 percent of the volume space to the square footage total, Staines noted.
”They put it on the plans, so when it`s compared to the guy down the street, it looks as if there`s 1,000 square feet more space with the same floor plan,” said Staines. ”That`s what drives people crazy.”
Some in the industry have suggested, half-jokingly, that the volume space problem could be solved by giving figures in cubic feet rather than square feet, sort of the way it`s done with refrigerators.
But that would simply increase confusion for the home buyer, said Gene Kripak, planning and marketing director for The Mitroff Companies, an Arlington Heights-based builder.
”People would have a difficult time understanding it,” he said. ”If there were zero gravity and you could float up to the second floor, that would be legitimate.”
Bloom said he was surprised that some consumer advocacy group hasn`t come up with a campaign for universal standards in determining square footage. In the present situation, he said, it could be like ”buying 20 pounds of dog food and finding out you`ve got only 10.”
Playing with square-footage counts is not always just a matter of salesmanship, Jans pointed out. Communities sometimes regulate the size of homes, measured in square feet.
Bartlett, for instance, requires a home on a two-acre lot in the highest residential zonning classification to be 2,500 square feet or more. Lake Forest, on the other hand, has a ”bulk” ordinance limiting the size of homes permissible on given lots.
By massaging figures, a builder could pump up the size of a Bartlett house or shave it down in Lake Forest. ”That`s the frustrating aspect for me,” said Jans.
How`s a buyer to figure out the real square footage? You could take a tape measure around the model home, though Bloom said builders aren`t too keen on that.
Another alternative would be to pin the builder down on exactly how he`s measuring. ”If you have any doubt, have the builder replicate his math on paper for you,” said Jans.
Square footage would be a sensitive issue for builders even if there were a universal calculation standard. Many feel that consumers focus too much on raw size, ignoring a home`s quality and livability.
Lexington, for instance, doesn`t include square footage figures on its pricing sheets, Maybrook said. Customers are given a figure if they ask, but they are urged to walk the home to get a real feel for its size.
”All that volume and corner glass and those clerestory windows and architectural design blows the home open to make it live,” he said. ”We want credit for that.”
But if builders try to downplay square footage in their marketing, many find to their distress that it comes up anyway.
”It`s so difficult to fight the battle of perception of value when the general public simply defines value as quantity,” said Kripak.
Michael Young, president of Elgin-based Sentry Homes, said his pet peeves are people who ask him how much per square foot he can build a home for.
”I can build you two houses of identical square feet, and there will be a $50-per-square-foot difference between them,” he said. ”It`s probably one of the dumber questions I get asked.”
The cheaper house would have such things as aluminum siding instead of brick, oak veneer doors instead of solid oak, vinyl flooring instead of ceramic or hardwood, and laminate countertops instead of Corian. ”Right there you change the whole square-foot price,” he said.
Despite the obviousness of such differences, builders still can have a rough time putting over the quality-versus-quantity argument, as Kripak as been learning at Windhill, an intensively landscaped, upper-bracket Mitroff development in Palatine.
The 99-lot community features 2,000- to 3,000-square-foot ”club” homes costing $270,000 to $380,000, and 2,800- to 4,000-square-foot ”country”
homes priced from $350,000 to more than $500,000. After two years, 40 percent of the homes have been sold.
”We`re attempting to appeal to the sophisticated moveup buyer, and took the assumption in design that buyers would be very discriminating in the specifics of every room in terms of amenities and standards,” Kripak said.
”We find, however, that even at that price range the primary decision is still based on square footage. It makes us have to work harder in presenting the details so people begin to stop and think about the total package they`re buying.”
