Author: Brian April 2, 2019

Do you know that in spite of the standard block getting smaller over the past 20 years the actual size of the houses has been getting bigger. The builders are doing a good job of selling us on the idea of more space.

There are three sizes of house you could buy:

1. The size you need . . .. SMALL
2. The size that you would like. . . . BIG
3. The size that the builder wants to sell you. . . .ENORMOUS

Get a bigger house and it could blow your Budget. To keep costs in check you need to do some preparation. Here are some suggestion:

1. Avoid starting by visiting show houses.
2. Go through your existing house throwing away all the junk you haven’t used in the last year or two. You could even raise some money and have a garage sale.
3. Measure the internal size of each room in your house, in m² and think about whether that room needs to be bigger, or could be smaller.
4. Don’t forget to include the wardrobes, the pantry, and the garage.
5. Don’t measure the hallways but allow 15-20m2 for hallways and passages.
6. Allow around 15-20m2 for internal and external walls.
7. Decide what additional rooms you need, for example an extra bedroom if you have another child on the way.
8. Add all the areas to get the total area of the house.
9. You could also convert the sizes to Squares for easy comparison when looking at adverts.
10. Start looking on the builders web sites or adverts for houses plans that are close to this size.
11. When you are looking at plans use the dimensions you originally took for each room to get a feel for the room sizes.
12. Only go and look at houses that are within the dimension you calculated, plus say no more than 10%.

To help I have prepared a Google documents Checklist which can be accessed from the link or the Checklist tab at the top of the page.

How have you made sure you haven’t finished up with a house that’s too big?

For posts about Costs see Budget

For Posts about Design see Floor Plans