A Bathtub Built Like a Wall: Brick by Brick, Laser Level Running

Day forty-two. The object this whole bath was designed around started existing.

Waterproofing: complete. Both bathrooms got their full Gomas treatment — floors entire, walls to waist height, roughly half a 9-liter pail. Corners and pipe penetrations were double-loaded; those seams are where bathrooms fail, always. With the black membrane continuous, the rooms are sealed vessels waiting for tile.

The tub rises. Then, the main event: the jojeok yokjo — our masonry bathtub — began. First the preparation: supply pipes and the tap body were boxed behind waterproof plasterboard so the brick courses meet no obstructions, and the tub’s footprint was leveled and struck with the laser.

Then bricklaying, with its old disciplines: sprinkle the slab so it doesn’t steal moisture from the mortar; bed the first course with obsessive care, because every brick above inherits its errors; check the laser line continuously, course by course — masonry drifts by millimeters until suddenly it’s drifted by centimeters. One field adaptation: where courses abut the existing wall, urethane foam served as the adhesive instead of mortar.

By day’s end the tub’s shell stood complete — “shell” being the honest word, since ahead lie interior plaster, Gomas coats, tile, and the built-in bench. But the room’s promise is suddenly physical: you can stand in it and imagine the window view from water level.

Scoping the finish carpentry. The day closed with the first interior-carpenter meeting (a second, for comparison quotes, will follow). The commission list: partition walls and a pocket sliding door for the bath (plus two more pocket doors — three total), ceiling channels for concealed wiring and recessed lights, and munseon casings — traditional timber trim wrapping the posts. The wiring cleanup also reached everywhere-but-the-master-bedroom, with grounding materials staged.

Water sealed out, tub rising, carpentry scoped. The bathroom crisis our mentor promised is being dismantled one day at a time.