Our homes have become our whole world – and now I'm obsessed with changing mine

Last week my housemate moved out, taking everything she owned, which was pretty much everything we had, with her.

She lived in this house for 10 years and had made it a true home – a soft-pink armchair from a friend who’d died, paintings from the desert community where she had worked, and a vintage cabinet you could barely close because it was so stuffed with pots and pans. She knew what to do when we blew a fuse, how often the gutters should be cleared, and why the neighbours screamed at their television on weekends in winter – “the Rabbitohs are losing again”. She had things in the attic.

When I moved in two years ago – leaving a foreign city, an apartment and a partner – the only possessions I had could fit in three large suitcases. I’d avoided acquiring much stuff of my own, on some level worried it might anchor me before I was ready. I preferred living like someone with a go bag: able to evacuate at a moment’s notice. Moving in with her, I was lucky to find the comforts of a readymade home, even if it was not really my own.

But the pandemic gave her the push to move in with her partner, and so last week she packed down her home and moved on.

Now I find myself in a house that looks as though it’s been thoroughly burgled. There’s nothing on the walls or the wooden floors, and barely any furniture. All of a sudden the imperative to make a home has been thrust upon me.

In a way the experience has only sharpened what many of us have been feeling quite acutely these past months – a growing desire to nest, to shelter in place and make that place as comforting as we can.

The coronavirus pandemic forced most of us to abandon our favourite haunts and streets, sometimes our workplaces, and retreat to flats or houses we might otherwise have spent little time in. “Home is out there, not in here,” Brigid Delaney wrote at the beginning of the lockdown. I felt that at the time, but months largely confined here have forced a rethink.

You can see it in the crowds braving the queues at Bunnings, even in the height of the outbreak, or the spike in calls to tradies to finally fix that ceiling crack or repaint the walls. If you’re lucky to have a steady home at this time and can afford to, improving it has become a compulsion – in South Australia, people are even being hospitalised by the urge. Our homes are our whole world all of a sudden, and unlike the chaotic outside one, they’re a world we can change. Even if it’s only in small ways, like a lick of paint or new Monstera.

I’m surprised by how quickly I have become a home obsessive. I trawl Facebook Marketplace at every hour of the day for bargains, like a teenager who has just discovered Pornhub. All my targeted online ads have flipped from dating apps and activewear to rugs and midcentury dining tables I can’t possibly afford (but will definitely click on anyway). I find myself scouring friends’ Instagram posts looking for ideas. “Obviously this outfit is everything,” I DMed my friend Lisa after she posted a picture in a vintage Mary Katrantzou knitted dress in her living room one night, “but where did you get those fabulous chairs?”

It’s easy for a habit to become an addiction at this time of anxiety and boredom – ask anyone hoarding jars of sourdough starter, or “social smokers”, how they’re doing right now. Shopping for furniture is no different and I can certainly feel the temptation to go Fight Club’s full-consumerist-nightmare and start obsessing over “what kind of dining set defines me as a person?”. But stronger than that is the urge for comfort – to have a little corner of the world that feels like my own. The first new thing I brought into the house was a framed picture of my grandmother, grinning on a beach in her 20s, which gives me a little jolt every time I pass it on the stairs.

Related: The coronavirus has made me so grateful for city parks. We should fight for them | Josephine Tovey

It’s a cruel irony of this pandemic that while many people are embracing domestic life others are being ripped out of it. There are for lease signs popping up every day in my neighbourhood, one where a lot of international students used to live, and piles of abandoned furniture on the kerbs. Online furniture forums are filled with ads tinged with desperation – “moving sale ... everything must go … trying to raise cash”. My sister and her young family are among the legions forced to move in with their parents, new multi-generation households where the focus is less on finding the right mirror than it is not driving each other insane, while wondering where home will be on the other side of all this.

I’m grateful to have spent the lockdown safe in these four walls. This place is a rental and won’t be mine forever, but maybe a few of the things I’m finding to put in it over the coming months will be. I’m not sure how much of it is this time in history, or this time in my life, but being able to throw down an anchor or two right now feels pretty good.