You know you have made the right decision, to move house, when there is almost nothing that you are sad to leave behind. That said, we were blessed with good neighbours, an excellent local brewery (Gadds’ Ramsgate Brewery – best in the world in my opinion) and I genuinely wept to bid farewell to Mrs Fox – an actual fox who we got to know and had been regularly visited by for at least five years – but mostly I just couldn’t wait to get to Norfolk and never again have to drive ‘home to Kent’.

It took us well over 18 months to finally complete a sale (and purchase) via two estate agents. That doesn’t sound like long now I’ve written it down but it felt like FOREVER when we were in it. It became like a full time job. There was all the preparation, starting with the cleaning of corners and spots that get overlooked during regular cleaning. Next the ‘staging’ so the sales photos would look good. This involved extensive decluttering ranging from deciding to actually get rid of a load of stuff to hiding everything else. Twice over, once for each estate agent, (and with more vigour the second time having failed to sell at first). Then there was the always being on stand by in case of a viewing. In which case more cleaning, and hiding of clutter, and disproportionate worry about the state of the place.

With the first agent I made the mistake of staying in the house when people looked round. One woman turned her nose up so much I thought she was a pig! Even though I didn’t repeat that error, I still had to endure the feedback from people who didn’t want to buy the place. This was usually nonsense like ‘the garden wasn’t big enough’ (clear from the photos that it wasn’t huge) and ‘beyond our budget’ (why view in the first place?) but sometimes it was a real reason and that was worse.

Finally a buyer came who wanted it! But the sale process became protracted and complicated, and more than a little fraught, and I learned what tension headaches were. We couldn’t believe it was going to happen, so we packed up slowly and half-heartedly. Then when, seemingly suddenly, it really was happening we had to do most of the packing in the space of a week-and-half. I still don’t know how we managed it, except my husband had had the good sense to insist we empty the loft early on and ‘decant’ its contents into the spare room.

Anyway, we’ve done it. We’re not in Kent anymore, Toto! There is however a lot of work to do to make our new place home.

To begin with we are ‘camping’ in our fortunately huge sitting room – now a bedsit – but it does have an open fire. I’ve bought some slightly frivolous curtains, with badly drawn mallards on them, that have made the place feel ours. And as I titivated them I spotted a deer in the garden, which is a good thing from my point of view. So we made a toast to new local wildlife and our new home with Gadds’ beer (really going to miss those fresh beer deliveries though) and pizza in front of a roaring fire and it’s nice to feel that there is nowhere else I’d rather be.