home size

This is a guest post from Steve Adcock, who writes at Think Save Retire, a blog about early retirement and Financial Independence. Steve and his wife retired in their mid-thirties to travel full time in an Airstream trailer. For more info, check out their YouTube channel.

One of the most deeply-embedded pieces of the “American Dream” is the desire for a large, spacious home with lots of sitting rooms, corners, nooks, and crannies. Large dining rooms and other entertainment spaces! Wrap-around porches! Two- or three-stall garages and one heck of a master suite!

To many of us, a large home is a mark of success. A big house indicate status, and the more space we’re able to call our own, the more successful we look and feel.

But, what if I told you that most of us don’t use even a fraction of that space? That’s not just me talking. A research team affiliated with the University of California studied American families and where they hung out the most inside their homes, how (and where) clutter builds, and the general stress level associated with living big.

The findings were overwhelming: The majority of the space in our homes is wasted.

How We Use Our Homes

As J.D. shared on Saturday, researchers at UCLA conducted a detailed study of 32 dual-income families living in the Los Angeles area, one of the first studies to document so vividly how we interact with the things for which we’ve paid good money. The findings were not pretty. In fact, they helped prove how little we use our big homes for things other than clutter or objects that hold little intrinsic value.

From the press release:

The researchers doggedly videotaped the activities of family members, tracked their every move with position-locating devices and documented their homes, yards and activities with reams and reams of photographs. They asked family members to narrate videotaped tours of their homes and took measurements at regular intervals of stress hormones via saliva samples.

When I originally wrote about the study, I took special note of where families spent the large majority of their time. In the following UCLA-published diagram of one family that was studied, we can easily observe a truth that’s probably common among so many of us: We tend to congregate around two primary areas of the home: food preparation/eating and television.

While this diagram only represents a single family, the results of the study suggest that this family is very typical of most of those studied, and the majority of traditional homes.