Four Air Conditioners and a Brick Bench in the Tub

Day fifty-six. A hanok is romance; August in Seoul is not. Today the house got its concession to the twenty-first century.

Cooling, times four. Four air conditioners went in, each room served by its own outdoor unit. Our contribution was the groundwork — literally: the outdoor units’ footing zones had voids against the wall, which we packed with leftover bricks and leveling mortar before the installers set their brackets. (Leftover materials now have a perfect employment record on this site.) Two-person crews, four units, done. Government subsidy paperwork and the final invoice get their own accounting later.

A seat in the tub. The masonry tub gained its final comfort feature: a built-in bench, bricked at two courses on the outer face and one inside — the geometry that lets you perch half-in, half-out, or sit a child at water’s edge. Technique note from the low courses: where only a course or two of height is needed, urethane adhesive replaces mortar entirely — identical result, far faster.

Round two on the seams. The wall-seam campaign continued: second putty pass over the board joints, and more urethane bond injected behind any board that still gave under a firm press. The painter’s standard is becoming ours: a wall isn’t done when it’s covered; it’s done when it’s monolithic.

Floor logistics locked: installation confirmed for the day after the windows go in, with one homework item — pack the window-to-floor gaps with cement beforehand.

And the filler, finally mastered. Where misting failed us before, the settled protocol now works: filler drawn as thin as the knife allows over cracks and rough zones; for genuinely uneven faces, a barely-damp mix and one gentle brush pass — thin being the entire secret. The day also delivered a painful rerun of the masking-tape rule: another batch left too long, another hour with blade and scraper. Remove the tape immediately. Always. We’re writing it twice because we apparently needed it twice.