Help me picture 1,000 square feet!
June 12, 2007 3:20 PM   Subscribe

Can you name something that is typically 1,000 square feet? I would like to say that something is 1,000 square feet, as big as a "blah blah blah," just for visualization purposes.

Is there some type of sports court or common thing out there that would make this easy to picture? Thanks.
posted by printchick to Grab Bag (23 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Umm, a small house or a largish apartment, but that might not help. A regulation racquetball court is apparently 40' x 20', or 800 sq. ft.
posted by JMOZ at 3:25 PM on June 12, 2007


Hmm, or half of a tennis court (using the singles' lines).
posted by JMOZ at 3:27 PM on June 12, 2007


Half of a volleyball court is 27 x 27'.
posted by acoutu at 3:30 PM on June 12, 2007


I always think of my apartment. It's 950. You should use that. "Yaaaaaa, it's about the size of, say, Darryl's apartment." "Oh! OK, gotcha!"

I generally think of a single floor of a normalish sized 3 bedroom house.
posted by The Deej at 3:31 PM on June 12, 2007


Divide.

10 feet by 100 feet.

32 feet by 32 feet.

A 1 yard strip, 100 yards long. Pull it back half way and double the width. 2 yards, 50 yards long. 4 yards, 25 yards long. What do you feel comfortable with?
posted by cmiller at 3:37 PM on June 12, 2007


Interesting. It's about three bowling lanes side-by-side.
posted by DefendBrooklyn at 3:43 PM on June 12, 2007 [2 favorites]


A 4-door car is about 6x15 or so - about 90 square feet - so 11 of them mashed up against each other would get you close.
posted by milkrate at 3:50 PM on June 12, 2007


1,352 cats.
posted by The Deej at 3:52 PM on June 12, 2007 [8 favorites]


A bungalow
posted by Flashman at 4:06 PM on June 12, 2007


A raquetball court is 800 square feet.

So, 1,000 square feet is "a little big bigger than a raquetball court."
posted by frogan at 4:31 PM on June 12, 2007


Going off the car idea above -- the size of about ten parking spaces.

(Cars vary, but parking spaces are usually somewhere around 8x18 or 10x20.)
posted by salvia at 4:33 PM on June 12, 2007 [1 favorite]


The volleyball court mentioned above is the 'new' size of an outdoor sand court. The 'traditional' court that most people are familiar with is an indoor volleyball court, which is 30x30, or 900sqft to a side, or 1,800 for the entire thing on both sides of the net.

If 900 sqft is close enough then I'd go with that.
posted by Four Flavors at 5:02 PM on June 12, 2007


All the pages of my local yellow phone directory (the leaves, that is) are about 1000 sq. ft.
posted by jamjam at 7:46 PM on June 12, 2007


My house. Or, alternately, my back yard.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:07 PM on June 12, 2007


~10000 rulers stacked on each other?
posted by trim17 at 8:42 PM on June 12, 2007


salvia: "Going off the car idea above -- the size of about ten parking spaces.

(Cars vary, but parking spaces are usually somewhere around 8x18 or 10x20.)
"

Umm, wouldn't that be 5-7 parking spaces, then?
posted by JMOZ at 11:31 PM on June 12, 2007


A typical residential street in the US is 32 feet wide. Thus, a typical residential intersection is about 1024 square feet.
posted by dhartung at 12:50 AM on June 13, 2007 [5 favorites]


One-third of a Seven Eleven or in-N-out burger.
2 X a two car garage.
One sixty foot accordion bus.
One floor of a double decker Amtrak railway car.
seven 20' shipping containers.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:18 AM on June 13, 2007


Conceptually, I like the intersection example.
posted by craven_morhead at 8:31 AM on June 13, 2007


Umm, wouldn't that be 5-7 parking spaces, then?

Oh man! You don't even know the half of it! What actually happened was that I wrote "the size of 5 parking spaces," then looked at that and thought "what a dumb mistake! It's 10! Man, I can't do math today!" Anyhow.

With that warning about my math, I'm personally not into the intersection example. It's a cool idea, but I am picturing the many different sorts of intersections and trying to figure out what kind of streets we're talking about. There is so much variation in street widths. I'm afraid people would picture a "typical" intersection from some random context, maybe a 7500 sf intersection from two arterials in Sacramento or something. (Eg, I tried googling "street width" without quote marks to start looking for standards, didn't find them, but result #1 was a Vancouver study pdf, finding that 72% of streets there are > 32'. Meanwhile, result #2 was a Georgia publication recommending skinny streets of 18-24'. Just so much variation.) Hmm, now I'm kind of fascinated by trying to picture what this prototypical 32' street and 1000 sf intersection look like.
posted by salvia at 12:29 AM on June 14, 2007


There's no national standard, salvia, each government entity (city, town, county) sets its own. 32 feet allows for two 9 foot travel lanes and two 7 foot parking lanes. Many subdivision streets -- especially the winding variety -- may have just enough for a car to park and two to pass, so those wouldn't be an example. In this link, that's referred to as a "conventional standard".

According to this article, it was the Institute of Traffic Engineers who set a 32-34 foot pavement "standard" (recommendation, really). But since a lot of streets are narrower, say, 26 feet, you end up with an intersection under 800 sq. ft. If that's too significantly different, hey, I'll refund my consulting fee. ;-)
posted by dhartung at 1:46 AM on June 14, 2007


dhartung, thanks for the cool link, but it wasn't the smaller streets that were concerning me. My only point was that we're not talking about these typical intersections: 1, 2, 3. My parents live in Strip Mall City, VA, so if you told them "a typical intersection," they might think of something like this. (Sad but true.) Now, I don't know what they'd consider "a typical residential intersection," but even the road that intersects their cul de sac is probably 48' wide, and the entrance itself is wide, and the rest of the time, literally, they're driving on roads like this.
posted by salvia at 11:00 AM on June 14, 2007


A medium size billboard is apparently 20' by 48'. Unfortunately, there is no one standard though.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:13 PM on June 17, 2007


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