Chapter 9: Making Room
The spare room has always been used as a catch-all, an extra walk-in closet, a place to stick anything that doesn’t go anywhere else. When I first bought the townhouse, I had cheap furniture I brought with me from my old studio apartment—a futon that doubled as both a bed and a sofa and a handful of wooden furniture I’d pieced together from Craigslist. The desk came from a college dorm somewhere, while the dresser must have seen duty in a child’s bedroom at some point, judging from the way each drawer was painted a different primary color. A pair of shoddily constructed bookcases rounded out the room.
Then there were the storage cubes I’d used to try to corral the crap as I squirreled it away. They were shelved on the bookcases, stacked on the desk, and shoved into
