Extract

Globally, statistics are used to investigate the condition of housing as an indicator of quality of
life. Among these house size is an important parameter for showing the quality of housing, although
measuring the floor area of a house is both time consuming and expensive, and would be very difficult for
big census samples. Information about the overall floor area of a house is also used in life cycle analysis
and energy and lighting simulation tools. A floor plan study of New Zealand houses was undertaken as
part of a larger project. In total, 287 published plans of New Zealand houses of various ages with differing
numbers of rooms were selected and analyzed in AutoCAD to find room and whole house areas. Data
about the average floor area for each room type for all houses were gathered in an Excel spreadsheet and
transferred to SPSS for further analysis. This showed that the size and combination of rooms of NZ houses
follow a specific pattern. Using the results, a tool was developed for estimating the floor area of a house
based on its number of different types of room. This study showed that with careful analysis of the floor
plans of examples from an existing national housing stock, it is possible to find patterns for the size and
types of rooms and use such information for predicting the floor area of similar house types.

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