The Gate Stands — and Two Old Posts Get Relief
원문: 한옥 셀프 리모델링 기록 #18 (대문칸 완성 · 기둥 동바리 작업 · 외벽 사고석 부착)
Day nineteen. The entrance finished its skeleton, and the house’s two weakest posts got the support they’d been quietly asking for.
Gate bay: structurally complete. The final sequence ran: roof rafters onto the gate structure → cover boards over the rafters → gable board on the flank → posts fixed to their foundation stones. What stands now at the entrance is a complete miniature hanok frame — everything but its tiles, which will go on with the main roof so the whole house is capped in one continuous operation.
Standing under it for the first time changes how the property greets you. Before, you walked into a construction site. Now you pass through something.
Shoring the tired posts. Two of the interior posts — original 1956 timber — had aged past the point of quiet confidence, so today began the dongbari (shoring) work. The method is patient: diagonal braces installed around each post first for safety, then a bottle jack easing the load off the old timber gradually — no sudden transfers, no shocks to a seventy-year-old frame.
To reach the outer post, the door frame’s mid-rail had to come out temporarily. Every removed piece was numbered and stored — because the plan isn’t to rebuild this area differently, it’s to put the original fabric back exactly where it was, around a structure that can now carry it.
The stone line reaches the gate. The courtyard wall’s sagoseok is fully attached, and the same course is now running along the gate-bay corridor — about 50% done. A design question surfaced mid-work: should the stone band step where the gate interrupts the wall, or hold one line? We chose one line — a single unified finish height across the entire exterior, gate included. Buildings feel calm when their horizontals agree.
Originally logged in Korean on March 7, 2026 — read the original. Translated and edited by the brothers who did the work.