The Four-Storey Mistake is the story of the Melendy family, Rush, Mona, Randy and Oliver, and their dog Isaac. It is also the story of a removal from a town house to a country house.

Randy sighed again and went out of the room for the last time. The last time: she'd been saying that to herself all day. She had paid a farewell visit to every single room in the house from the Office, which had been the Melendy children's playroom, to the furnace room in the basement. All of them looked bare and cold and friendless.

That morning the moving men had swarmed through the place, rolling up carpets, packing barrels, lumbering up and down the stairs with couches and chests of drawers on their backs like mammoth snails. Everything about the moving men was huge: their big striped aprons, their swelling necks and biceps, and their voices. Especially their voices; they had bawled at each other like giants shouting from mountaintops: ‘Give us a hand with the pianna, Al,’ or ‘ Careful of that corner, Joe, don't knock them casters off.’ But now they had gone, and all the furniture with them; swallowed up in two vans the size of two Noah's arks; and the house was an echoing shell, bereft and desolate.

Soon the painters and plasterers and carpenters would come into the house. They would patch up the ceiling, bolster up the sagging staircase, paint and polish and mend till every sign of the Melendys was gone: the iodine stain on the baseboard, Randy's pictures, ‘Plasticine’ marks on the Office ceiling, the height-measuring marks of each Melendy child on the upstairs bathroom door, and all the dozens of other souvenirs left by four busy children in a home. The new people who had bought the house were old: a doctor and his wife. They were rich, too. How quiet the place would be under its new pelt of thick carpet. Old feet would go slowly up and down the stairs, doors would never slam, meals would be served on time by noiseless servants.

‘Poor house,’ said Randy. For a minute she almost hated Father for selling their nice home without a word and buying a new one in the country.