House exchange sounds both exotic and practical. However, initially my husband disagreed. He thought it a thoroughly bad idea, like leaving your front door ajar or buying second-hand shoes. But a month of emailing him listings at work won him over, especially the prospect of a family trip to the UK that didn’t lean too heavily on our credit card. I, on the other hand, felt comfortable with the idea from the start. I quickly sensed that it was about exchanging homes, not houses. I liked the idea of joining a club in which trust triumphs over paranoia.

Nearly everyone I mentioned our upcoming exchange to promptly replied, “What a good idea”, as if just listening to me had inspired them to rush home and join a home exchange website. But I knew hardly any, if any, actually would. It’s easy to toy with the idea but much trickier to take the next step. Yes, you have to take photos, create a listing and overcome your shyness in contacting other members. But more than this, you have to be willing to look at your home in a newly critical light. You have to look deep into your cutlery drawer and see the congealed fluff and crumbs, just as a visitor might, and then set about removing them.

I was a novice at exchanging. However, I knew from my experience of sharing a family beach house roughly what I was getting into. I knew it wasn’t free accommodation and that it wasn’t something to be done lightly. I joined two websites: Home Base Holidays, a London-based company, and Intervac USA. Both are well-run sites, along the lines of an internet dating agency (not that I’d really know). Apart from the obvious compatibilities, like time availability and children, much of the selection boils down to luck (whether a suitable member clicks on your listing) and the tone you adopt when emailing (friendly but not urgent).

I did my homework. Plenty of guides, with their bullet points and good intentions, list all the dos and don’ts. It doesn’t really matter, they explain, if your home is more modest than your exchangers’. What matters is that it looks clean and well presented when they walk into it. It doesn’t matter if you have one bathroom and they have three, just so long as they know that beforehand. Ditto if they have a double garage and you only have off-street parking. Or if they’re retired and you’re not, just as long as they’re comfortable with your children being children in their sitting room. But it really does matter, all the guides emphasise, if you lead them on in such a way that when they open your front door, thousands of miles from home, their hearts sink. Guarding against disappointment is the golden rule of home exchange. Your much-prized home is, in the eyes of exchangers, always just a place to stay.

When I at last got the key to turn in the lock of our house-to-be in Windsor, I felt relieved, not let down. As promised, it boasted a view of Windsor Castle (assuming, that is, I stuck my head out the top dormer window in the cold of January). It was just the kind of narrow Victorian terrace house that would have been ours if we’d moved outside London a few years ago, rather than moving to Melbourne.

From the first day, we treated it like home. By the fifth week, there wasn’t a cupboard we hadn’t peered into. In between we bought gumboots and got truly muddy in Windsor Great Park. We explored London’s museums by day and retreated to our warm nest by night. We had in-laws to stay, entertained old friends, got lost on the M25, and returned home grateful that we have a big enough garden to even contemplate growing vegetables.

Our house exchange experience wasn’t all roses. The house didn’t have laundry facilities. In their lengthy notes (nearly as lengthy as mine), the family asked me to leave all the linen clean and dry. Fair enough, except that the launderette was an eight-minute walk away, only took one pound coins and we had an early flight on the morning of our departure.

That said, house exchange is a wonderful thing. Exchangers really can be trusted, they really will look after your things, and it's extremely unlikely that they'll scrape the paintwork on your car. They might even leave your house cleaner than the way you left it.