Hakon.

He crosses to the sidewalk opposite, twelve or fifteen meters, and looks at the facade from there. He points a finger at the corner that is giving before he takes out the spirit level; when he sets it down, the number proves him right. He doesn't always get it on the first try, but he gets it right often enough that they call him for exactly that: one survey less. He brushes it off by saying he knows that row by heart, that he has been inside almost all of them and that the ones he hasn't touched yet can be seen coming from the street.

A millimeter and a half is his unit for everything small. A millimeter and a half of lean in a partition wall, a millimeter and a half of play in a door frame that no longer shuts all the way, a millimeter and a half of whatever matters little to him and matters some. “It is nothing, but it is a millimeter and a half every year,” he says, and that is where the argument ends. In a house that rests on piles, eight years of a millimeter and a half come to a good centimeter of crooked house.