Bookcases, a Budget Smart Screen, and Wi-Fi: The Stay Takes Shape

Day eighty-three. The mental shift is complete: nothing today felt like construction — it all felt like preparing a stage for guests. The calm is new, and welcome.

Flat-pack meditation. Four IKEA BILLY bookcases — two tall, two small — assembled in sequence. By unit two, the repeated hardware becomes muscle memory (the shelf-hinge pins being the one genuinely confusing step); by unit four, it’s assembly-line rhythm. They’ll serve double duty: guest-facing bookshelves and, in their quieter compartments, storage for operating supplies. Design-friendly and operational — the furniture equivalent of good staff.

The smart screen gamble. For in-room media we tested the budget path: the “Sam-ten-by-me” — the affectionately-nicknamed Korean market alternative to LG’s StanbyME wheeled screen — at roughly ₩300,000, a third of the original’s price. Honest review after self-assembly: corded power instead of battery (outlet geography now matters), a stingy stock cable (solved with an extension lead), and a notably heavy steel stand that turns out to be a feature — the screen rolls without wobble. Self-installing also saved the ₩60,000 technician visit. For a stay, where the screen lives its life near a wall anyway: the right call.

Infrastructure and stone. The essential invisible amenity — internet — went live after a carrier-by-carrier comparison landed on LG U+. And the courtyard’s future arrived on a pallet: border stones for the mounded flower bed, trial-arranged along the planned lines, with gravel and soil behind them. Assembly plan: urethane foam to bond the stones (of course), then the drainage-and-soil build-up. The garden is the last canvas left.