because ikea never cared to write narrative instructions for their GORM series shelves (odas elementales)
brooklyn, new york, january 2023
dedicated to Teresa, Robert, and mom
These are the ones effectively made of planks. Simple, unvarnished pine. None of the pressboard garbage that will disintegrate after a year or so of ordinary use. Held up with stout black screws as long as your finger. Open on all sides.
They say these are for storage, for the garage, but fuck their aesthetic judgments. These shelves will hold you for just about anything.
You’ll need a socket wrench with the right size head, not just some dime-a-dozen Allen wrench. You’ll keep the one your father gave you near to hand, with just the right attachment, for just this purpose. Also the ratcheting screwdriver your ex abandoned with you. (Ratcheting makes it easier.)
The shelves affix along the posts like ribs along a spine. Remember: this, too, is a joint. While they look architectural, your ribs are meant to move. And, likewise, the GORM. This is why I would never recommend moving them assembled, all-of-a-piece. Like your body—like your life—these need to be held and treated as a flexible assemblage of smaller pieces. Take them apart. They’re not that hard to put back together once you’ve settled in.
It’s easiest to assemble them on the ground, but in a tight space you can also do it standing. And you can do it on your own. It’s ok to do it on your own. No shame in not having help. Just be intentional and clever with the angles; keep the movement parallel, never splayed, or you’ll stress the wood.
Do what your father always said: only finger-tight, first. Tighten down any one joint and again, you risk cracking the crossbeams. Get it standing even if it doesn’t seem ready. At this point it feels alarmingly unlike a piece of furniture, so loose-jointed it will practically walk on its own. Slow dance with it. Tighten one bolt a little; listen for cries of protest and never tighten past the whine to the crack. Feel what other parts of the shelf this part has eased or made firm, what joints, what muscle systems; feel where it rocks and where its feet land. Embrace the shelf like you embraced the mammogram machine. Understand that, like that machine, like your own body, what it wants will emerge.
But do tighten. Bring the shelf to its own confident sense of firmness, and fix it to the wall, lest it lean into an uncertain parallelogram and collapse under the weight of your books. Never set it looming over a bed. You were raised in California. Let your earthquake feng shui protect you.
See how the knots in the pine are still visible. Every plank has a unique face, like the knotted faces in the ceiling in Maine that you named and spoke to when you were new to language (Mr. Tuesdaywednesdaythursdayfridaysaturday).
Sometimes, in the moving process, the remnant of a branch will have slid out of its hole in a plank, a tiny erection uncowed by the discipline and punishment of machining for flat-pack Scandinavian-identity Fordism. Persisting.
Treat them respectfully, and these shelves will last for a surprisingly long time, outlasting your student days when their appeal is their $12 price and a recommendation from your friend who is learning to like it rough up in Seattle (he’ll settle down with a daddy, get domestic with finer things, collect midcentury modern when he can: that pyramid lampshade on the poodle lamp); they will continue to be the only thing you trust with the weight of your yearbooks, everything you’ve studied and can’t rid yourself of, the books in huge acid-proof covers you salvaged when the library dumpstered them. Everything you threw in the closet when your artistic partnership fell apart and you kicked him out of the apartment; every spare set of dishes and gift of unstoreable appliances to your next roommate, another full-grown adult with her own history to bear. Everything, back in storage, out of storage, back in storage again.
These shelves will last you over twenty years, while every other Ikea piece disgorges its trifling little shelf pegs, shakes to urea-laced sawdust, and is left at the curb; while Ikea itself forsakes the fervent cult of GORM1 in favor of a lighter-weight alternative that, with the inexorable logic of late-monopoly capitalism, may be the same honest pine but is somehow ever so slightly incompatible in measurements.
Crack as few crossbeams as you can. Care for your GORM as it cares for you. This body is a limited, precious resource.2
* * *
have I moved in someplace? I’ve moved in someplace. am I ceasing to wander? oh, I never know. best to keep the joints loose. god is change.
made it the entire way without making the GORMless joke 🙌🏻