Six-Hundred-Millimeter Tiles at Forty-Five Degrees

Day fifty-four. With the wood floors looming on the calendar, every unfinished interior surface became urgent at once.

The partition earns its keep. The main bathroom’s shower partition — the ceramic board installed last week — got its final skin: 600 mm large-format tiles, edges mitered at 45° in the jolly-cut style to close every corner in a folded line. Large tiles raise the stakes on precision: a 600 mm face telegraphs the slightest lean, and a mitered edge on a tile that size leaves no trim to hide behind. Cheolsu-hyung treated it as the high-difficulty piece it was, and the finished partition reads as a single ceramic monolith. The annex bathroom advanced in parallel — morning-long wall work with us on support duty, about 40% covered.

Orders out: six boxes of tile for the bath, and SMC ceiling panels — the moisture-proof system that will close the bathroom ceilings.

The filler campaign begins — with a footnote. The ceilings’ final cosmetic pass started: acrylic filler over the six mesh-finished zones of the annex ceiling, chasing the last roughness and hairline cracks before paint. We applied our beloved mist-and-brush method.

Here the honest record requires a confession from the near future: this was wrong. We’d later learn that acrylic filler, unlike X18, responds to enthusiastic misting and brushing by sagging — the water re-liquefies it and gravity does the rest, leaving droops and pinholes to repair. The filler wants to be a putty: thin coats, a dry touch, and restraint. The method that made our cement plastering excellent actively sabotages this material.

Two days, two material-character lessons. The pattern is now unmistakable: every product in this house has a personality, and the job goes well exactly when we stop negotiating with it.