After more than a year of putting up with my noisy ant-colony neighbors upstairs, I decided to take the plunge and move house.

With thoughts of packing up all of my stuff – that has somehow grown from a 20 kilogram backpack 4.5 years ago to a one bedroom apartment chock-full of things, echoing through my mind, I couldn't help but think back over my four previous moves in Beijing.

The first was relatively simple: I was living in the Friendship Hotel's residence – a stark Russian-style concrete complex, with a beautiful garden, that once housed most of the foreign media in Beijing. The smell was reminiscent of my high school in Sydney, as I guess they were both built during the 1950s when asbestos was in its hey-day.

I chose to move a little closer to the city's action and into something that had a working stove, hot water and significantly more character and picked out a $45-a-week room in a great duplex with open terrace in a tree-lined hutong with a Swede, Belgian and Brit.

As I had only been in Beijing a short time, my move included a taxi, one backpack, an extra shopping bag and being caught at reception trying to steal coat hangers that for some unknown reason, I thought I deserved.

After almost a year and a half of craziness in my group home, I then opted for a place of my own and found a dirt-cheap one bedroom in an old Chinese high-rise for $250 a month. My move involved a team of seven men who ran up and down the six flights of stairs of my old place and up the nine flights in my new home, carrying an accumulated quarter of a truck of possessions on their shoulders in 1.5 hours, at a cost of $19.

Another 18 months later and my landlord lost his job and was forced to move back to his one-bedder from a five-bedroom sprawling mansion on the outskirts of the city. Once again I enlisted a team, this time for $20, to move my now half-a-truck's worth of goods, three blocks down the street to a slightly-upgraded space.

By far the most memorable of all moves, I had unpacked a few of my boxes and gone to work when my very kind ayi (who came twice a week for a couple of hours to help with housework and the ironing) decided to lend a hand and unpack the remaining containers. Returning from work that evening I found that nothing was anywhere that I could find.

My wine glasses were in a cabinet in the bedroom. My socks had been stored under the TV set and the DVDs were in a box beneath the sink. My initial panic soon subsided and a never-ending treasure-hunt and discovery of cultural relics created some excellent surprises as two years of finding my stuff ensued.

This week's move marked my 20th in my adult life.

I paid a lot of money for a team of moving professionals to pack up a now almost-full delivery truck and unload it at the other end. I found some of my previously-hidden treasures and I am about to open the remainder of my boxes. I bought a lot of new furniture. My apartment is four times the size of my bedsit and infinitely more expensive and I have vowed never ever to move again.