How I became addicted to moving house
Shona’s moved 10 times in 16 years — once just 50 yards down the road. As she puts her house up for sale AGAIN, even her husband and friends are baffled by what drives her...
THERE is a man’s name in my phone contacts — let’s call him Dave — who was once an important person to me but who now refuses to answer my calls.
He has seemingly dropped off the face of the planet, except I often see his white van whizzing around the West Sussex city of Chichester where I live, so I know it is actually only me he is trying to avoid.
I can’t really blame him. He isn’t an ex-boyfriend or even a friend for that matter. He’s just some poor, unsuspecting bloke who happens to own an extra-long wheelbase Luton van and who once advertised his removals business on Gumtree.
He didn’t know it when I first contacted him in 2018, but he was doomed to help me move four times over the next six years — on one occasion just 50 yards down the road to a house I whimsically decided I preferred simply because it had a Jack and Jill bathroom and parquet in the hallway.
He has seen the contents of my underwear drawer more times than my husband and got groin strain twice from trying to shove our super-kingsize bed up narrow staircases it was never meant to go.
He thinks I am a loon. Which is why, just over three years since our last move and with yet another For Sale sign outside our home, he is ignoring me.
The last time I spoke to him he declared PTSD before saying he never wanted to see my 7ft Polish oak dining table again ‘because it’s an absolute bugger to get around tight corners’.
YOU might wonder why I have this crazy compulsion to keep moving house. It’s not because I’m on the run from the police or been assigned to a witness protection programme. The truth is, like many people with an addiction, I just can’t help myself. I’m no different to an alcoholic or someone who sniffs coke in pub toilets. At least they have support groups. I just get dented furniture and removal men blacklisting me.
Since having our first daughter Flo, in 1998, we have lived in 13 properties. That’s an average of roughly one house move every 25 months. When you consider that for six of these years — 2002 to 2008 — we were in the same home, the maths makes me sound ever so slightly unhinged.
Other than the aforementioned house — a beautiful, detached Edwardian property with a wisteria that bloomed twice a year — the longest we have lived in one place is three years and five months. We’ve been in our current Victorian semi in Chichester for three years and four months and there is a For Sale sign outside. I’m definitely not in recovery yet.
With the first home we bought, in Haslemere, Surrey, in 1999, having moved out of London with Flo, then aged one, it was justifiable to move again three years later because we’d welcomed two more children and a black Labrador called Oscar. Then came the big house with the wisteria which I know my long-suffering husband Keith hoped would become our pension — and most definitely a home we’d still be living in today.
Instead, we have moved ten times since then — each time because I have initiated it. Eight of those houses have been rentals; two were ones we bought.
I look back and wonder why I forced us to move from that lovely wisteria house. In many ways it was the beginning of my slide into this compulsion. Certainly, my husband never wanted to sell. We’d spent £100,000 doing it up and the children all had spacious bedrooms of their own. There was a trampoline in the garden and guinea pigs in a hutch. He was right: if we had stayed, we would be rolling in it now as it’s worth over a million. But because of me and my poor decision-making we sold it and are facing a less financially secure future.
But with three children under four and a stream of mostly useless au pairs, family life was strained. Keith worked in London all day and I was struggling to adjust to the juggle that is freelancing and motherhood. It wasn’t a particularly easy time in our marriage and, gorgeous as the house was, I never felt wholly happy there.
There have been three houses where we have lasted just six months. They were all rentals but still there was no concrete reason for leaving any of them except I simply woke up one morning and decided I didn’t want to be there any longer.
The first house, in 2008, was on the Foley Estate in Liphook, Hampshire, and very remote — tucked deep in the woods on the country estate.
Having fallen in love with that house as a rural idyll, I began to detest all the pheasant shooting and the fact it took me for ever to drive out and buy a pint of milk.
So we swapped for a new-build on an estate in a nearby village, which I thought would be great for the kids to cycle around safely but eventually began to irritate me because, like all new-builds, the plug sockets were in stupid places and I started to yearn for originality and period features.
There were a few more houses and a four-year stint living in North Devon before the third of these six-month rentals came about in Chichester in 2019.
This house was practically next door to the one we’d been living in for a year, but it had beautiful sash windows, cornicing and, I thought, more practical living space.
BUT the day we moved in, I suddenly decided that I hated it. None of our furniture fitted, the light felt all wrong and I discovered that the basement loo was a Saniflo which made a really intrusive noise for ages after flushing.
I remember sitting outside crying
as Dave tried, and failed, to squeeze our lovely black-and-white sofa through the front door. Everything ended up in storage but, having signed a contract, we were committed to staying for six months — which I spent on Rightmove.
Of course, with rentals it is easier to up and go. There is none of the financial outlay of buying and selling with legal costs and stamp duty. But my family — in particular Keith — would vehemently argue that the logistics and emotional upheaval have been just as significant and also, in most cases, entirely unnecessary.
And then there’s the financial impact: the practicalities of moving house costs around £1,000 each time and I have really tried to make every house ‘ours’ by redecorating, even the rentals.
Indeed, we made money from our house sales — we bought our house in Haslemere for £239,000 and sold it for £290,000, while we bought the beautiful Liphook house for £412,000 and sold it for £610,000. We made a £20,000 profit on our eighth home, in Devon.
But with stamp duty, legal bills and storage and removal costs, I can’t even begin to calculate the financial impact this obsession has had on the family. The emotional burden is more obvious.
Keith relocated to Dubai seven years ago, after we moved from North Devon back up to West Sussex, and we try to see each other every eight weeks or so. He tells people it’s his job as a sales director that took him there, but I wonder if this decision to be 4,000 miles away from me has anything to do with his desire to exist under one roof for longer than five minutes. I know he finds my restlessness exhausting and doesn’t understand why I have this compulsion to move. Why can’t I just be happy with where we settle?
The thing is, I am usually happy in the beginning. I love that feeling of stepping over the threshold of a new home and starting from scratch. I relish all the exciting possibilities a fresh space brings to reinvent and put down roots.
And, strange as it might sound, I hate the upheaval of moving. Who doesn’t? Having done it so many times, the thought of packing up boxes and the ensuing chaos for weeks afterwards makes me want to lie down in a dark room with a bottle of whisky.
Moving is incredibly stressful — famously, one of the most stressful things you can do after death and divorce — and I have put my family through this far too often. Then there’s the admin. Quite honestly, I have spent more hours on the phone to internet service providers, energy companies and councils than I have changing the nappies of my four children.
And don’t get me started on postcodes. If there’s one way to prove to yourself that you’re not suffering from early-onset dementia, it’s being able to remember a postcode from a house you lived in six years ago when you’ve lived in four other houses since.
Just in Chichester alone I can reel off PO19 1TZ, PO19 1UU, PO19 1PX and PO19 3BJ. I should enter Mastermind with this as my specialist subject.
But I’m painfully aware that my endless quest for the perfect home is not normal behaviour. Nor is the fact that all the reasons I find for moving into a house inevitably become the reasons I want to leave it.
Take where we are right now. I adored this property the second I crossed the threshold. It has two fireplaces and a quirky open-plan layout downstairs that I initially found characterful and endearing. Now, it just annoys me.
There’s nowhere to hide the detritus of family life or, indeed, to hide from anyone else. Also, I initially preferred that there was a courtyard rather than a garden for the dogs. No mud! But I’ve got two large Labradoodles who will only pee on grass. What the hell was I thinking?
Friends are convinced I have a psychological problem. It’s entirely obvious to them that I am finding issues to force another move and there is some behavioural science to support this.
Psychologists believe that people who moved a lot as children may be experiencing what Freudian analysts call ‘repetition compulsion’ or a Goldilocks complex — always looking for just the right place. I was born in Hong Kong and moved to Seattle as a baby before settling in the UK. At the age of five we went to live in Fiji. Then it was back to the UK and, when I was 13, another move to Australia. In total, I lived in five countries and 15 homes before the age of 17. My dad was a land developer, building tourist resorts.
There is another theory that people who made a drastic move when they were young feel like they don’t quite belong. It’s a constant quest for roots that can never be found.
I have never sought professional support for this compulsion, although I probably should.
LOOKING back, I can see that this compulsive behaviour started long before I had a family. In my 20s, in London, I moved ten times in five years. My poor father would spend weekends carting my belongings from one grotty flat to another.
Some therapists call frequent moving ‘pulling a geographic’. This is seeking external changes to change internal problems. But even I know that, no matter how many times I move, I’m still taking myself with me.
What I need is — to adapt a Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer phrase — to love my house not list it. And I’m trying so hard to do this. I wander from room to room forcing myself to imagine being here in five, ten, 20 years. But I just can’t picture it.
I can, however, picture very clearly a house with a big garden and lots of storage. OK, we’ll have to move to Bognor just down the road to afford that, but I can love Bognor if it means being able to tick these boxes.
As far as addictions go — is it so bad really, this aversion to being stagnant? At least I’m doing my bit to keep the housing market afloat. I also once read a quote saying: ‘Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.’
That can go on my gravestone. The one place where I will finally rest in peace.