We moved house yesterday - quite literally. When we first moved into our lovely flat, we took one look at the large room with enormous windows at the front of the house and said “oh yes, that’ll be the bedroom, thankyewverymuch” leaving the middle room (which has two doors - one to the hallway, by the main entrance, and a door to the West Wing, with stairs to the spare room/study and bathroom) to be the living room. Besides, why would anyone put a bedroom in the middle of the house? Anyone who came to stay or for dinner would have to traipse through our bedroom to get to the bathroom or the front door. So it made much more sense for that room to be the living room.

And you know, it worked pretty well like that - though the living room had built in cupboards along one wall, and far too many books and bits of electronic gadgetry for such a small room. And the bedroom had big, bright sash windows overlooking the road, and because it was slightly larger, also housed my computer as well as our bed. But the other small problem was the noisy fecker across the road, with his terrible taste in music and his unsociable listening hours. We tossed and turned and pulled our hair out at the noise, stubbornly refusing to rethink our room arrangement, investing instead in earplugs and ambient music to overplay.

And then, on Saturday night, the Rah couple downstairs had a dinner party, and ended up playing Trivial Pursuit with their guests until long after two. We know the game because their voices were so loud, bouncing off wooden floors, and booming with booze, that we could answer all the questions through our floor. Their living room, you see is at the front of the house, something they have in common with every other flat on our street (or so we assume, from nosing at our neighbours).

At half two, we were curled up in the spare room. I was doing the Guardian Quick Crossword, and P was having a spod at his machine (which lives in there), when suddenly it occured to us that it was possible to move the flat around. Why not?

When we got up on Sunday, we had a bacon butty each, and then set about moving everything. Like moving house, but without the stairs.

But at the end…oh my. What a lovely quiet bedroom. What a beautiful bright living room. For the first time in eight years, my computer isn’t in my bedroom. I have a bedroom which is just a bedroom. No, not just. Exclusively a bedroom. A quiet, comfortable, big, bright bedroom.

Of course, because of all the moving around, it felt like sleeping in a new flat, which meant that I was hyper-aware of all the other strange noises: someone’s fridge shaking down in the early hours, my alarm clock buzzing gently. A different kind of noise; quiet noise. But what a lovely change.