Neighbours and the shared building

The list holds one plain verb, encombrer, and English already owns it — it simply keeps it somewhere else. « Encumber » came in from Old French encombrer in the Middle Ages and has spent the centuries drifting upwards into formal and legal registers. A property is encumbered by a mortgage; an « encumbrance » is a charge registered against a title; a household is « encumbered with debt » in a report, never in a kitchen. French did the opposite and kept the word at floor level, which is why les cartons encombrent tout le couloir is the plainest way to say it, une rue encombrée is a jammed street, and l’encombrement is both the space a thing takes up and a traffic jam. The adjective went further still: encombrant describes a wardrobe, and equally a guest who will not leave, and in the plural it has hardened into a noun every tenant in a French building has to know — les encombrants are the bulky items the council collects on a fixed date. So the word a reader of English has is the right one, set two registers too high.