Close quarters

People ask me all the time how large our Manhattan apartment is, and for years I couldn't say exactly. The best I could offer was, "Trust me, it's smaller than your living room and kitchen put together." Sometimes, I'd say, "It's a shoe box," and people would nod and laugh as if they knew exactly what a shoe box-sized apartment was. Tonight, I decided to measure the apartment and answer the question definitively; consider this the authoritative word on precisely how big a "shoe box-sized" apartment is*.
Here's a diagram of our place. Don't bother with the calculator, because I've done the math -- our entire apartment is about 317 square feet. To put this in some sort of perspective, the average home size in the United States was 2,330 square feet in 2004.

Obviously, there are various challenges and inconveniences that come with living in such a small space. But there are also perks. The apartment is easier to clean because there's less of it to clean, and since storage space is almost non-existent, we are never tempted to hoard any junk (accordingly, our trash and recycling bags and are enormous). And should we ever get around to decorating the place properly, we could always enter the annual Smallest, Coolest Apartment Contest.

*These diagrams and measurements are for informational purposes only. By posting them, I do not intend to imply that our apartment is insufficient for our needs, nor am I ignoring the fact that many people have to make do with less. It's likely that the majority of the world's population live in spaces much smaller than ours, and many millions of people live without homes altogether. We're thankful for what we have.