I feel like author was never before in a frugal situation. These kind of things were common in student dorms (may be not to the scale of putting in hard work on making a table have wheels to move). I love the situations that surrounds with limitations to test your creativity in fulfilling your needs.
You assume everyone is innately inclined to improve his/her living space in this way in frugal situation? That's not true. There are plenty of poor families which don't do that (for various reasons such as WAF explained in this forum).
It's common in student dorms because it's kind of tradition, students learn to do it from one another. Still it can be surprising to freshmen if they haven't encountered it before.
(Author here) While I can understand your perspective, the way and approach he took in solving these problems was very different. It wasn't because we didn't have the means, it was just his way of expressing himself in solving the problem at hand.
Not the main commentator, I think farmers market or the weekly markets that happen in few places in cities are good and depending on when they have been imported asian/turkish stores can have fresh veggies(debatable), or if you are in a small town you could actually have a small local market nearby.
