How much space do we need?

[phathui5]

Dh and I are talking about adopting. Ideally, we'd like to adopt a sibling pair that's within the age range of our bio children (3-10).

I was wondering what size of house adoption agencies expect you to have. The house we're renting has three bedrooms, but could be changed into four or five if we partitioned off the upstairs (the second floor is one big room).

[marsupial-mom]

In our case... they don't just look at square feet, they look at the number of bedrooms, the number of closets, and the number of bathrooms.
Our home is 1600 sq ft with 3 bedrooms and 2.5 bath. We could have qualified for a total of six children!

[phathui5]

For closets, would it work if we got the children dressers? Does the closet thing matter?

[marsupial-mom]

Every agency is going to have different rules. You'll just need to find out the rules for yours.
For us, rooms aren't considered bedrooms unless they have a closet. That's a real estate law. Might be different where you are.

[DTmama1]

Regulations in my state for fostering are 50 square foot for each child in their bedroom. There aren't any closet regulations and we don't have them in our upstairs either. They don't really measure for the exact amount. I have 5 kids (one bio and 4 I'm adopting) currently and am licensed to have up to 3 more. We have 1.5 bathrooms, and 4 rooms that can be used as bedrooms in the county I'm licensed through, though the county next to us is pickier and only 3 of those rooms can be used as bedrooms (same regs, different interpretations).

[queenjane]

Here we have to have 40 sq ft of bedroom space per child, they dont care about the sq ft of the other rooms. When i lived in a two bd apt, i could have two children in one bedroom and three people (me plus two kids) in the other one. I was only licensed for two though because they were being stingy about upping my number. When i moved, it was to a four bedroom house, and now i'm licensed for four, i could have tons more looking at just sq footage but here they cap the number of foster kids you can have at four (and eight kids total.)

[Polliwog]

Hey, I was thinking of you not too long ago. How are things going with your new crew?


Here you need to have 40 square feet per child of bedroom space. They've never measured my rooms and I suspect they'd just get a waiver if there wasn't enough space.

[sesa70]

in our state they don't count the closets, but they do require the room have at least one window. I do think it varies from state to state. Good luck!

[phathui5]

I called today and they said it has to have a window and a door with room for a bed and a dresser. So it looks like we should have enough space.