My husband loves moving furniture. He typically does it when I’m not around. Like when I attended a writer’s retreat for a week. While I was focusing on structure, rhythm and my voice, he was back home rearranging the living room.
He rotated the art on the walls, swapped the chairs and added a rug. In the library, the round table was now in the corner, replaced by a low Japanese table. He also moved our “bar,” a giant Chinese cabinet that stores liquor, bills, stamps, envelopes, pens and a gift-wrapped water pitcher (a present for my sister-in-law that I keep forgetting to give her). Instead of seeing it when I first walked in — the pop of red, always a happy sight — it was tucked in against the opposite wall.
All told, in this moving marathon, he changed five rooms. He never asked how I might feel about the matter. He never told me he was going to be moving the furniture. He just did it.
I can’t imagine moving furniture (or buying furniture) without his input. We have been married for 34 years and together for 37. We’re a team. We have the same aesthetic. We spend our free time perusing antique shops, flea markets and auctions. We even met while working at an auction house, Butterfield & Butterfield in San Francisco. He was a painting expert, and I, naturally, worked in the furniture department.
I can deal with some change, but not five rooms at once. After that writer’s retreat, I walked in, tired from the long flight home but exhilarated from the week. I dropped my bag in the mudroom. Seeing me, my husband called out “Buggy!” (our nickname for each other) and ran toward me for the biggest hug.
After our embrace, he said, “I can’t wait to show you something.” He grabbed my hand, pulling me toward the library. As we moved through the house, my eyes darting around, nothing looked the same. Where was I?
And then I felt that old, yucky feeling of “Oh my god, he’s done it again. He’s moved the furniture without checking with me.” The anger crept up my body, gaining ferocity until I yelled, “I can’t believe you! How many times do I have to tell you?”
All this transpired, unfortunately, while our adult daughter was visiting. She took his side because I was the one yelling. “He worked so hard,” she said, and “he did something thoughtful and beautiful, wanting to make you happy.”
“You have no idea what goes on in a marriage,” I said. “This is a theme. Every time he does it, I ask him to please consult me first. It makes me feel invisible and disrespected.” Now I was furious with my husband andmy daughter.
The truth is that my husband can’t help it. Try as I might, I’ve concluded he will never change. His father also loved to move furniture. When my husband was a young boy, he used to give his father “gift cards” worth several hours of help moving furniture for his birthday or Christmas. Stumped while trying to write his father’s eulogy a few years back, he paused and moved some furniture, which got the words flowing.
His parents ended up in marriage counseling because of furniture.
His mother, an artist, decided to clean some dirt off an old piece, admiring her handiwork and the chest’s shiny new self. My father-in-law lost his cool and said she had ruined its patina.
I guess I should be grateful that my husband is at least good at moving furniture. There’s never a scratch on the floor or a mark on the wall. I once saw him move our dining room table, made from a heavy piece of burl wood, by getting on all fours, crawling under the table, arching his back like a cat, and inching this giant object, turtle-like, to its destination two rooms over.
He somehow managed to move a heavy treadmill (a Covid purchase) from the curb to our basement by tipping it onto a skateboard and rolling it to the stairwell, where he tied it with a garden hose, slid some cardboard under it, and slowly lowered it down the steps. He told me this method works for moving things upstairs, too — he once hauled a large antique chest up two steep, tight flights by himself, tilted onto a furniture mat.
“Furniture mats are key,” he says.
When I asked him why he moves furniture when I’m away, he said, “Because you’d get mad at me.”
“But I get mad at you when I get home.”
His response? “No committees. I want the freedom to move things where I want to.”
You can see why I get angry.
When I am around during a furniture-moving session, like when he moves tables and chairs to make more space for Thanksgiving, I sometimes offer to help. Though I never want to. I hate moving furniture — I hate the physical act, and I like the security of things being where I expect them.
The bottom line is he’s best doing it on his own. There’s no friction.
I learned recently that my husband is not alone in his compulsion. I read that Rick Steves, the travel writer and TV personality, sometimes rearranges the furniture in his hotel rooms. My husband does that regularly, including once in a rental in Vermont. That time, he didn’t move the sofa and chairs back because he claimed he had “improved the flow of the room.”
He thought he was doing the owners, whose rental was part of a venerable historic-preservation organization, a favor. They disagreed. They sent us a letter of complaint, admonishing us not to do that again. Now he always moves the furniture back.
Another thing that has always irked me about my husband’s shifty shiftings is that after my yelling, he calmly says, “Just try it for a week or two; I can always move it back.”
I grew up in a military family, moving all the time, and can adjust to just about anything. He knows that my number one skill, according to an assessment I took a few years back, is adaptability. Once he says that, I know it’s over; the stuff will never be moved back. And because I’m so adaptable, I usually do get used to it.
And there are times I’ve been glad. One Mother’s Day, I was out for several hours, and my husband, this time with the help of our son, decided to make me an office. As a mother of two, I’d been craving a room of my own. A space that was just mine with a door that I could shut.
In a small room under the eaves, the two of them removed the guest bed, chest of drawers and table, and replaced them with a “desk” (an old door resting on two filing cabinets), a light, a small bookshelf and a comfy chair for reading in the corner. The office chair came later. That time, there was no yelling, just shrieks of delight. Ten years later, that little room is still my oasis.
I hate to admit this to him, because I will always believe he should consult with me first, but I have noticed over the years that moving things around changes the energy. I see things differently. The light shifts, shadows emerge. It keeps our old house from feeling stagnant or boring.
Maybe it does the same for our marriage. Stephen Mitchell, in his book “Can Love Last?,” suggests that relationships thrive in the tension between security and adventure, familiarity and novelty, predictability and passion. Maybe our daughter was partially right that day. Maybe we both were.
Recently, at the summer house we share with my husband’s two brothers, my husband rearranged the furniture on a weekend I wasn’t there.
By himself, he moved a daybed downstairs and set it up against a window facing the cove. He constructed a shelf to bridge the small gap between the bed and the window, creating a space for a coffee cup, a glass of water or a book. He arranged three pillows on either side. He found an old vessel filled with household stuff, which he emptied and placed on a table nearby. He discovered that if he tapped it with his finger, it chimes, the sound resonating for four minutes. (Yes, we timed it.)
He said he made the spot with me in mind. Every time we visit, I head straight for it.
