Two Missing Rows: Closing the Wall Before the Inspectors Come

Day eighty-seven. The Hanok Experience Business inspection — the license that makes Doiok legal — approaches, and today was spent making the exterior tell a completed story.

The debt of two rows. The facade’s wapyeon band, star of many March entries, had been carrying a quiet incompleteness: the top two rows were never pointed, and on the wall facing the neighbors, a whole section had been skipped — then left for a month, collecting dust in every open joint. (Sweeping grime out of gaps before filling them is the tax on deferred work. The resolution we wrote in the log, in bold, for our future selves: finish each process completely before starting the next.)

The technique had also evolved since March. Findings from today’s final pointing session:

• X18 over white cement, even for joints — better spread, cleaner cured face
• Retire the spray bottle. Misting the joint soaks the surrounding wapyeon, sends gray cement-water running down the finished wall, and — where water pooled — produced cure cracks. The replacement: dip the brush itself in a tub of water and sweep the joint directly. The water goes only where the brush goes
• Tape off before cure — the rule needs no re-explanation; we finally obeyed it and the lines came out clean
• Wipe splatter off the black tiles immediately — white cement on dark wapyeon is invisible today and permanent tomorrow

Cure cracks from the over-wet zones got flagged for a dab of acrylic filler after full cure. With that, the sentence we’ve waited three months to write: the exterior walls are finished.

The floor’s third coat. The courtyard’s stone coating got its final targeted pass — the extra pail deployed wherever the aggregate texture ran thin, particles stirred faithfully, sponge-roller doctrine observed. The madang now wears an even stone-textured skin corner to corner, ready to be walked on by inspectors and guests in that order.