Apartment Floor Plans

Often, when people are looking at houses or apartments, the square footage is the magic number. The amount of space can sometimes trump all other concerns save location. In reality, however, you can not really consider the size of the apartment in a vacuum. The layout is every bit as important to your happiness and comfort.

This fact was really brought home to me when I was looking for a new apartment about six months ago. It was in an odd old building downtown with a variety of different apartment floor plans. Apparently, the owner had been unable to come up with a simple pricing scheme. There seemed to be at least a dozen different apartment floor plans, and each of them had a different price.

Usually, it was not the apartment floorplans themselves that determined the price, but rather the square footage. Originally, I planned on getting the biggest apartment that I could, since I was living with my wife and had a girlfriend on the way, but once I started looking over the apartment layout I realized that there was more at stake. The apartment floor plans for the biggest rooms were not very good. They were long and skinny, with oddly hidden nooks and corners. There were quite a few areas that were simply unusable because they were not big enough to do anything with.

This made me realize that it is not the total amount of space in an apartment floor plan that matters, but rather the amount and quality of usable space. A narrow, oddly shaped apartment might be quite large in terms of total square feet, but if it feels cramped with furniture or bookcases in it, then it will not do you much good. A smaller room might be totally adequate for your needs if it has a more sensible square shape which allows you to make maximum use of the space there is.

To get back to my own situation, it was a big problem deciding. In the end, I drew out the apartment floor plans on some graph paper and sketched out all of my furniture on top of that plan. I checked out all the apartments to figure out which of them would best fit my possessions. Once I found something that looked like it would work well with the stuff I had, I knew my decision was made. That was the apartment that I ended up settling on.