We Glued the First Boards On Upside Down

Day thirty. Wall insulation went from test to production — beginning with an honest correction.

The upside-down incident. Reviewing yesterday’s test panels, we discovered we’d understood the boards backwards: the white face is the bonding face, the black face is the show face. Ours were mounted white-out. A small comedy, quickly corrected — and exactly why you test on three panels before committing to fifty-five.

Ten walls, properly. Production followed, correctly oriented: the annex plus bedrooms 2 and 3, ten wall faces total. The hard truth about this house asserted itself immediately — not one wall is flat. The techniques that got us through:

• Cut as little as possible. Every cut degrades the board edge and invites lippage. Full sheets wherever they fit; the ragged top row gets laser-leveled and trimmed after mounting, one room at a time.
• For hollow walls: mount to the proudest points, then inject urethane foam generously into the recesses behind and press the board until it planes up with its neighbors.
• Outlets, taps, and window frames pre-cut before the adhesive goes on — never discovered afterward.

The kitchen becomes a memory. Our Karrot helper of the day, Mr. Dawit, methodically dismantled the main house’s old kitchen — every cabinet screw backed out, units carried off whole. This floor space is promised to the project’s most ambitious room: the hanok bath. The timber waste pile grew alarmingly again.

Newspaper archaeology. Stripping walls for boarding, we hit the house’s history in cross-section: wallpaper over wallpaper over plasterboard over tile — and finally, old newspapers pasted directly onto the cement, insulation-by-newsprint, decades old. Reading walls is slow demolition; we lingered anyway.