The third apartment

The first apartment had one long wall and a radiator in the wrong place. The shelf system went up in two columns because that was what the wall allowed, and it stayed that way for a year and a half. Nobody thought of it as furniture that could be anything else. It was simply the shelf.

The second apartment had no long wall at all. The two columns came down in about twenty minutes, travelled flat in the back of a hatchback with the seats folded, and went back up as one column beside a window and one column in the hallway. Same uprights, same shelves, same slots. The only thing bought for the move was a roll of felt to keep the plywood off a rougher floor.

By the third apartment the habit had set. Furniture gets measured against the room instead of the room getting measured against the furniture. A stool that was under a desk becomes the thing beside the bath. A low table loses two legs to a taller set and becomes a bench. None of this is clever design on our part; it is what happens when a system keeps one pitch and refuses to introduce a second kind of fastener.

There is a version of buying furniture that assumes the room is permanent. Most rooms are not. We would rather build for the ones that are borrowed, and let the parts outlast the lease.