A packed garage, a spare room sealed for years and a hall closet that won’t latch, and the up-to-$113,500 figure a new survey put on the square footage American homes quietly surrender without noticing

The stuff simply accumulated quietly, year after year, until whole rooms quietly changed jobs. And now, researchers have put a precise dollar value on exactly what that slow creep is costing the households it has swallowed. Most people think of clutter as a tidying problem, not a money problemThat framing is almost certainly wrong. And the math, once you do it room by room, starts to feel uncomfortable in a very specific way. The rooms that quietly stopped being roomsOver half of Americans, 54 percent, sacrifice between 100 and 500 square feet of their home to possessions they rarely use.