Three Carpenters, Three Days, and a House That Refuses Right Angles

Days fifty through fifty-two. The interior carpenters arrived — and the house taught them the same lesson it’s been teaching us.

Two crews, parallel tracks. Carpenter One took the living areas and bath: the triangular leftover space where bath ceiling meets wall closed with plywood; the bath’s partition wall framed with its pocket-door slot; and light boxes run along the living-room ceiling edges — the channels that swallow the wiring and will throw downlights below and indirect glow above. Carpenter Two ran the annex: a light-box ring around the full ceiling perimeter, and the project’s quiet highlight — three aged posts wrapped in lauan casings, old structure dressed in clean timber without pretending to be new. Both crews also reinforced the upper wall panels where air conditioners will hang; plywood behind plasterboard now, no anchors into mystery later.

The schedule tax. The estimate was two days. The hanok disagreed. Nothing here is square, no two bays repeat, and every box and casing is a bespoke negotiation — so day three brought a third carpenter and work running into the night. We’ve stopped being surprised: whatever a trade quotes for a normal house, a hanok adds a day.

Our own humbling, outdoors. Staying clear of the carpenters, we took the established brush-finish plaster method to the exterior eaves: mask the rafters, foam the gaps behind, X18 on, mist, brush. It went on beautifully — then cracked as it dried. Diagnosis: mix too wet, misting too enthusiastic, or both; outdoors drying is a different physics. The cracks get acrylic filler later.

The second failure was pettier and worse: we left the masking tape on overnight. Cement cured over the tape edges, welding it in place — and a 20-minute peel became hours of scalpel archaeology, one embedded strip at a time. Rule, now permanent: plaster, then pull tape, same hour.