Creating Sections
Ever wondered how to calculate the square footage of a house plan? It is a fairly simple thing to do. Moreover, it is a key component in planning a house design. Breaking down the floor plans of a design into square or rectangle sections is the best way to calculate the square footage (aka, the area) of a house. In other words, divide the plan into small parts where you can figure the area of each section. Separate the conditioned (aka, heat & cool) and unconditioned (aka, unheated) areas of the home prior to establishing your sections.
The conditioned areas are the parts of the home that will have heating and cooling provided by the HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning) system. These areas include the kitchen, bedrooms, living room, dining, and so on. Spaces like the garage, storage, porches, and decks will not have heating and cooling. By dividing these areas, you will be able to separate the total heated and unheated spaces.
When taking the dimensions of each room or section, be sure to include interior and exterior walls. It is not enough to use clear space dimensions for calculating. Excluding the width of the walls will result in a miscalculation of the overall square footage. However, be sure that you don’t count an interior wall twice. To avoid doing this, take your measurements from the outside face of a wall to the inside face of the opposite wall. When a section extends from exterior to exterior, measurements are to be taken from the outside face of the first wall to the outside face of the opposite wall.
Calculating Sections
Now that you have the home plan divided into manageable sections, you can begin your calculations. Take the width of a section and multiply it by the depth. This gives you the sq ft of that section. For example, a 18’x30′ section (18 feet width, 30 feet depth) would have a total area of 540 sq ft. Now repeat this process for every section of the house that you have created. Remember to keep the conditioned and unconditioned areas separate when you calculate the square footage of a house.
Calculate the square footage of a house plan
Tally the Sections
You need to add the square footage of each section that will be regulated by the HVAC unit to find the total calculated square footage of conditioned home space. If you have six (6) sections on the house, each having 500 sq ft of space, the total area would be 3,000 sq ft. The unconditioned areas should be separated and listed by individual rooms. The following illustrates how the total square footage would be listed on a set of house plan blueprints.
SQUARE FOOTAGE
Floor plan: 3,000 sq ft
Garage: 440 sq ft
Porch: 72 sq ft
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Total: 3512 sq ft
The floor plan square footage is the total conditioned space. The garage and porch is unconditioned space. The total is the sum of conditioned and unconditioned sq ft.