A familiar room changes when the person who usually fills its silence is away.

Part of what a room is made of is the people in it. When someone is away, or gone, the same furniture in the same light produces a different quality of quiet, because you have been hearing them in it for years and now the space where their noise went is audible. Nothing has moved, and everything registers differently.

If a room has become hard to sit in, you are allowed to change something small: a different chair, the radio on, a lamp in a new place. Or you can leave it exactly as it is and simply know why it feels like that. Both are reasonable responses.