LIFESTYLE & REAL ESTATE | CEDAR & STONE REALTY GROUP | MAY 2026

The Room Nobody Uses

There's a room in a lot of homes I tour that tells me everything I need to know.

It's usually upstairs. The door is slightly ajar. Inside, there's a guest bed with decorative pillows that haven't been touched since last Thanksgiving. A treadmill wearing a winter coat. A bookshelf that stopped getting new additions around 2009. Maybe a desk with a monitor nobody turns on anymore.

It is a perfectly nice room. It is also a room that nobody uses.

And when I walk past it, I find myself wondering: how much square footage in this house is actually lived in? How much of the mortgage, the property taxes, the heating bill, the weekend maintenance hours — how much of it is being paid for rooms that function primarily as storage units with better drywall?

This isn't a judgment. I've had this thought in beautiful homes owned by wonderful people. It's just an honest observation about what happens when life changes and the house doesn't catch up.

Kids leave. Careers shift. Bodies get a little less interested in flights of stairs. The hobbies you planned to pursue in the bonus room turned out not to be your hobbies after all. Life narrows in some ways and expands in others — and sometimes the house you're in was designed for a version of your life that no longer exists.

I work with a lot of homeowners who are thinking about right-sizing — matching their home to the life they're actually living, not the life they had fifteen years ago. And almost all of them say the same thing when we finally have the conversation: I wish we'd started thinking about this sooner.

The rooms nobody uses aren't a problem. They're information.

If you've been quietly wondering whether your home still fits your life — I'd love to talk. No pressure, no timeline. Just a real conversation.

— Stacey Cedar & Stone Realty Group | Serving the Portland Metro & Southwest Washington