Five Pallets in One Hour: The Great Tile Haul

Day forty. Before tiling can start, tiles must physically enter the house — and today that was the whole show.

The haul. Two one-ton trucks delivered five pallets: wall and floor tile, bricks for the masonry tub, cement for the leveling pour and plaster. A forklift carried pallets to the gate; from there, human chains. Three workers hired through Karrot (₩20,000/hour each) plus us moved four pallets the ~6 meters indoors in about an hour. The bricks took longer than everything else combined — small, chip-prone, and only movable by the handful. Logistics bill: ₩80,000 trucks, ₩80,000 forklift, ₩180,000 labor. ₩340,000 before a single tile touches a wall — the invisible line item in every renovation budget.

The storage mistake we’d meet again. Cement and mortar were stacked on pallets and double-sheeted in plastic — the correct practice — yet some leveling-mortar bags still found moisture and cured into stone inside their bags. Weeks later, at the leveling pour, those petrified bags would cost us real grief. Cement is patient; water always wins.

Teaching a mud wall to hold tile. The hanok’s original earthen walls are the coming tile’s enemy: aged mud loses its cohesion, and tile adhesive bonds to whatever the surface layer is — which here can simply detach. The treatment: Moldine (a bonding primer) brushed over the friable zones, then reinforcing plaster to rebuild a flat, grippy face. Skip this on an old mud wall and the wall sheds your tile in its own time.

And the daily ritual: one more insulation board up along the bath wall. The boards no longer merit their own headline — which is its own kind of progress.