THEY say that moving house is up there with bereavement and divorce as the most stressful things you can go through.

In a recent poll of 2,000 adults who moved home in the past three years, almost two in three (61per cent) placed the ordeal at the top of their stress list. Relationship breakdown, divorce and starting a new job came joint second.

The study, for energy company E.ON, found that the average Brit moves home five times during their lifetime, with the stress lasting more than three months. Losing possessions and having to replace furniture were the most anxiety-inducing aspects of moving, and apparently a quarter of us leave it several weeks before we finishing unpacking. I still had unpacked boxes lying around about two years after I last moved.

It has taken my brother over a year to sell his home and buy another one, thanks to a frustrating series of setbacks. Coming on top of a particularly bleak year in which he lost both parents, the stress of moving almost made him ill, and took its toll on his children too.

Now I'm about to embark on the whole ugly process of moving house. After months of dithering, I finally put my home on the market and now it doesn't really feel like my home anymore.

Within a week of the For Sale sign going up I had a phone-call from the estate agent wanting to arrange a viewing. Cue a chaotic couple of hours of whizzing round with the vacuum cleaner and a duster, scrubbing a grimy hob, (a hob that hasn't have seen a scourer for a while), mopping the kitchen floor, and shoving odds and ends under beds and in wardrobes. The problem with tidying up and de-cluttering is that you end up spending ages on the small stuff. Once I started re-arranging pictures on walls it became an obsession, and it was only when I got bogged down re-arranging my bookcase that I had to force myself to take a deep breath.

"Is an alphabetical row of EM Forster novels really going to be a deal-breaker?" I asked myself. The answer was no.

Overall, I have lived in 16 different properties in various places, from North Wales to the South coast. When I was younger, moving house just meant carting a couple of boxes about in my parents' car and, far from being stressful, it was an adventure. But those were the heady days of flat shares, communal kitchens and washing-up rotas.

Now my home is open to the public, and having strangers poking about in my living-room takes a bit of getting used to. It must be how the owners of stately homes feel during the tourist season - only without the west wing and gift shop.