In pursuing my dream of having a table tennis table in my home, I have to consider room size.
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The real honest answer to the question of how big a room for table tennis should be… is “as big as possible”. However, I know most people won’t be satisfied with that, so let’s start with this:
Table Tennis Table Size:
The good news is that this is easy to identify and serves for a great starting point.
The international standard size is about 30 inches tall, about 9 feet long, and about 5 feet wide. (This is represented in centimeters as a height of 76cm, a length of 274cm, and a width of 152.5cm.)
There are smaller table sold for recreation, but it would feel like bowling on a shortened lane. (I know it’s kind of a strange analogy, but that’s how I felt.)
I recommend the full size table even if it means sacrificing a little elbow room or furniture in the room.
Now the next thing to struggle with is how much space you need to move… I could rephrase this as how good are you, your family, and your friends (by this I mean your opponents!).
If you guys are hitting long balls or really working both sides of the table, you are going to want enough space so that you don’t have to hold back at all. (Which also brings up the question of how BIG are you? If you are 6′ 5″ with a wingspan, you may want even more space.l)
I think I’m going to want about 2 meters on either side of the table, meaning a total of about 9 meters in width on the room. (Although I’m sure people can do fine with only about 1.5 meters on each side if they have to.) 9 meters translates to about 29ft or so.
As for space around the length of the table, I would want about 4 meters on each side of the table for a total length of about 11 meters or so, that would be a room of about 36 feet long.
As it stands, we’ve come to a point where we want a room that’s about 36 feet long and 39 feet wide or more is the dream size for a table tennis room, but I’m sure you can get by with much less.
The answer then comes back to our original answer which is that you want as much room as you can get, but most of us are not going to buy a new house just to have a table tennis room… since we can go and play other places, it is not an incredible priority to have a table tennis table in the house, but if you have a large basement with a high enough ceiling that you can convert go for it. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m moving back to the United States soon, so I will certainly be looking at room and basement size when I look at houses.
Does anyone have any experience with this? Am I grossly overestimating the size I need?