Cape Cods pack 1,000–2,000 sq ft into a story and a half: a full first floor plus an upstairs tucked under the roof, where sloped ceilings and knee walls shrink the usable — and floorable — area.
Upstairs rooms sit between knee walls, so the real floor area runs to the knee wall, not to the exterior wall line printed on the plan. Dormers add small jogs. First floors are compact and rectangular, and older plans sometimes dimension to the framing rather than the finished face.
The reliable way to measure any cape cod plan is off the drawing itself: calibrate against a printed dimension line, then trace each room along the inside face of the walls. Upstairs, trace to the knee wall — the edge of usable floor — not the roof footprint. Spot-check one upstairs room against a printed dimension: half-story plans are the ones most often drawn at a different scale from the first floor.
PlanTape does the tracing for you. It detects every labelled room and the scale line in under two minutes, you fine-tune the corners, and the per-room areas and baseboard perimeters export as a CSV — in square feet and feet.
Typically 1,000–2,000 sq ft (93–186 m²) of internal floor area, with 2–4 bedrooms over 1.5 stories. Exact size varies by year and builder; the floor plan for your specific unit is the only reliable source.
Upload the floor plan PDF to PlanTape: it traces each room along the inside face of the walls and calibrates scale from a printed dimension — feet-and-inches dimensions like 24′-6″ are read natively. Upstairs, trace to the knee wall — the edge of usable floor — not the roof footprint. Spot-check one upstairs room against a printed dimension: half-story plans are the ones most often drawn at a different scale from the first floor. Then export per-room areas and perimeters as CSV, in sq ft and feet.
Upstairs rooms sit between knee walls, so the real floor area runs to the knee wall, not to the exterior wall line printed on the plan. Dormers add small jogs. First floors are compact and rectangular, and older plans sometimes dimension to the framing rather than the finished face.
