The Best Insulation Was There All Along: What the Tile Man Taught Us
원문: 한옥 셀프 리모델링 기록 #13 (천장단열 작업 · 외벽석재마감 · 천장 마감재 테스트 · 기와업체미팅)
Day fourteen. The last foam board went into the ceiling, and a conversation with the tile contractor changed how we thought about the whole roof.
Insulation: 100%. The final bays were the worst bays — above the corridor light fixture, where rafters crowd together and no two surfaces align. No measuring possible; each piece of foam board was carved by eye, offered up, shaved, offered again. Every seam then got a second pass of urethane foam. Not elegant, but complete: the entire ceiling of the main house is now insulated, seventy years after it was built without any.
The facade grows upward. On the exterior wall, the composition we’d planned came together: eight boxes of sagoseok granite blocks and the first box of wapyeon — fragments of black roof tile, mortared in as a decorative band. Two bags of Dryfix went in. Stone below, black tile-fragments above: the wall started looking like it belonged to a hanok rather than just any masonry building. We liked it enough to decide on the spot that the courtyard walls get the identical treatment.
Testing the ceiling finish. With insulation done, we tested the finish system on four ceiling bays: Ardex X18 — a cement so sticky our carpenter calls it “the Hermès of cement” — troweled thin over the foam board, mesh pressed in, surface leveled. Tomorrow we check adhesion, cracking, and finish quality before committing to the whole house.
The roofing meeting that mattered. The tile contractor confirmed the plan for laying tiles (our house lacks a pyeonggodae in places — his crew will batten those with lumber), and then delivered the day’s insight. We asked about adding a synthetic thermal blanket under the tiles. His answer: don’t bother. The clay bed — the very stuff that had been crumbling onto our heads for a month — is the traditional roof’s insulation layer and humidity regulator, and it outperforms the artificial addition. Seal the holes with clay mortar, lay the tiles, trust the system.
Full roof measurements were taken for the quote. Interior sealed, exterior dressed, roof plan settled — a day of closings.
Originally logged in Korean on March 3, 2026 — read the original. Translated and edited by the brothers who did the work.