Whether you’re looking to buy a home or rent an apartment and want to know just how much a square foot is, or you simply want to get a better feel for the size of a square foot, it’s often best to compare the measurement to other objects.
Understanding how big a square foot is can help you estimate home needs, cargo space, or backyard sports options.
Floor Tiles
Floor tiles can be found in a range of different sizes, but one common size is 12 inches by 12 inches or 1 square foot.
A tile that’s a square foot is considered to be on the larger end of tile sizes.
Picturing a large floor tile, or even counting the tiles in a kitchen, bathroom, or patio area can help you quickly estimate what a square foot looks like or how many square feet are in a given area.
A Bed
Most people can easily visualize the size of a twin, queen, or king bed, and learning how many square feet each of these mattresses is can make it easier to visualize what a square foot looks like.
A twin mattress is the smallest standard mattress size. It measures 76 inches by 38 inches or 6.33 feet by 3.2 feet.
Multiplying the length by the height tells us that a twin mattress is 2,888 square inches or 20.26 square feet.
A queen mattress is slightly larger, measuring 80 inches by 60 inches or 6.67 feet by 5 feet.
This gives us square footage of about 33.35. A king mattress measures 80 inches by 76 inches or 6.67 feet by 6.33 feet, which is equal to the square footage of about 42.22.
Knowing how many square feet are in a certain mattress size can help you not only visualize square feet better but can also tell you how much space a bed of a particular size will take up in a room.
A Bathroom
Bathrooms can vary greatly in size, but most spare bathrooms or bathrooms used for bedrooms other than the master bedroom have an average shape.
These bathrooms, on average, are between 36 and 40 square feet.
This is about the size of a bathroom that holds a sink with a small to medium-sized vanity, a toilet, and a shower, bath, or combination shower and bath.
Sports Playing Areas
Even non-sports enthusiasts can usually picture a baseball diamond, football field, volleyball court, or basketball court, and being able to visualize these areas, and knowing about how many square feet they are, can help you better estimate how many square feet a large area is.
A baseball field can vary in size depending on the particular stadium or park. However, the baseball diamond must always be a standard size. Each base is 90 feet from the next, so the diamond itself is 8,100 square feet.
A football field is 360 feet long and 160 feet wide. This gives us a total square footage of 57,600 square feet.
This is quite a large area, but it helps to visualize when someone describes a park, warehouse, or backyard as “as big as a football field.”
Volleyball courts are much smaller than other sports fields or courts, but knowing how many square feet a volleyball court contains and being able to visualize it can help you estimate the size of a very large room or a small to medium backyard.
These courts are 59 feet long and 29.5 feet wide, which is equal to 1,740.5 square feet.
Basketball courts are a bit larger than volleyball courts, but they’re not as big as other sports playing areas.
These courts are just a bit less than 92 feet long and just a bit more than 49 feet wide, which gives a square footage of about 4,508.
This is about the size of a large home.
Smaller sports objects can also be useful in visualizing square feet.
A ping pong table, for example, is 5 feet wide and 9 feet long, for a square footage of 45 feet.
Pool tables can be found in a few sizes, but the medium size is 8 feet long and 4 feet wide, which equals 32 square feet. This is just smaller than an average bathroom.
A Piece of Paper
If you need to measure out a small amount of square footage in a pinch but you don’t have a ruler, a piece of paper is a good way to either measure or visualize.
In the United States, copy paper is 11 inches long, which is just 1 inch shorter than a foot.
Paper is also 8.5 inches wide.
Although it’s somewhat smaller than a square foot, visualizing a piece of paper can help you visualize something just under 1 square foot, which can help you decide if a tile or piece of furniture will fit where you want it.
