This article emphasizes the value of the experience of making things with your own hands in a modern world full of fast-consuming, ready-made products. In particular, the process of building a house has taught me the value of manual labor, the sense of accomplishment that comes with it, and a more mature outlook on life.
Nowadays, we seem to be surrounded by so many finished products. From convenience store bento boxes and instant noodles that only need a microwave or hot water, to clothes, computers, and even cars and apartments that are always with us, making it easy to forget their usefulness. I often wonder if we’ve forgotten what it feels like to make something ourselves, or more broadly, to do something ourselves. In case there’s any misunderstanding, I’m not referring to leisure activities such as sports or cultural activities, but to the act of gathering materials and making things yourself. I realized this from my own experience of building my own house, and I’m going to tell you more about it.
My father was thinking about homesteading after retirement. My maternal uncle lives in the countryside, so he often visited the countryside, but after a long time of thinking about it, he saw people living an unfulfilling life after retirement, so he decided to go back to farming. That’s how our house building project started.
In fact, we didn’t start building a house on a completely empty plot of land. If we had, we would have had to call in the professionals. We decided to expand and remodel a house that had once belonged to a distant relative’s grandmother, an old house with strong bones. Crucially, the government wouldn’t allow us to demolish it because it was dangerous due to electrical wiring issues.
Before starting construction, the team prepared the materials needed to build the house. First, I went to get ochre for the interior walls. Luckily, my father had already found a place, so my uncle and I loaded a one-ton truck with shovels. However, due to the light rain at the right time, the ochre didn’t spread well, and it was very difficult to move it to the yard when we got home. Next, we prepared sand to mix with the cement, which required fine sand, so we scooped it up from the creek near the house. We had to sift the sand by hand to remove pebbles and large stones. Finally, we bought bricks and stacked them, but the deposit for the ‘pallet’ (brick base) was 10,000 won, so we had to move the bricks to the yard and return the pallet.
There were two types of bricks we used. We used 4,000 bricks called ‘brick’, which is the familiar rectangular shape, and about 1,000 bricks called ‘cement brick’, which has three large holes in the center. It turns out that these bricks, which at first glance appear to be simply different shapes, are perfectly sized and complement each other’s strength when lined up horizontally and vertically. I could feel that hundreds of years of building history had optimized even the shape of the bricks.
Before the foundation could be laid, it was necessary to partially demolish the interior walls. The walls were supported by stainless steel beams, and then the walls were demolished. The ground was dug up to form the foundation for the widened area, and bricks were laid on top of it, which was very difficult to level. We used a spirit level, but it moved at the slightest angle, so we had to use weights on a thread to make sure the bricks were stacked vertically, or use a hose with water at each end to check the level. In the past, many of our schools were built on slopes, and I wondered how builders leveled them. I looked it up and found out that they use machines like optical levels. We didn’t use precise machines, but I realized the importance of theory and practical application by actually using the theories that I had only learned in books, such as gravity and water having the same pressure at the same height. Without this experience, if I had to lay bricks or balance them one day, I wouldn’t know what to do without a machine.
The next step was to start laying bricks in earnest. We used cement bricks on the outside and ocher bricks on the inside, and my role was mainly to help my father and uncle. For example, when my father was laying bricks on a high place, I would bring him bricks or cement. When the cement ran out, I had to sift the sand and mix it with the cement. It was hard work, but I didn’t have any skills. I realized that I had to learn how to do this kind of work.
Also, the wood supporting the ceiling was rotten and needed to be repaired. I fell off the ceiling a few times during this process, but I was lucky not to get hurt. After the ceiling was repaired, bricks were laid between the roof and ceiling, and the outer husk of rice called chaff was filled with insulation. The final step of bricklaying was plastering. Plastering is the process of filling in gaps and holes in the bricks from the outside to make them flat.
The last step of the exterior work was to install the windows and doors. The door frame was fitted during the initial bricklaying, but the windows were fitted after the bricks were laid. As expected, the windows were not easy to fit. The weight of the bricks on top of the window frame made it difficult. Even the neighbors helped us get it in. Installing the window frame was difficult because it wasn’t new and we weren’t professional mechanics. Once inside, wallpapering and sheetrock were relatively easy, but the hardest part was putting up the insulation sheets on the ceiling. We had to hold on for dear life, and if there was the slightest crack, we had to start over.
With that, the house building project was nearing completion. To minimize electricity use, solar panels were installed on the roof. These panels are a system that sends electricity back to the power plant. Even if we use a lot of electricity, we can send the electricity collected by the solar panels to the power plant. We still need to figure out how to utilize the second floor of the expanded space and finish the shed by the front door, but we’re very proud of the overall look.
As with all things, it’s always nice to see the end result after the hard work. Growing up in the city, I never really cared about the process of how a house is built, what materials go into it, or how long it takes, and I didn’t think I needed to know. But when I built my own house, I realized that buildings like my home and school were important to me, and I gained a more mature perspective by thinking about how they were built and how their safety was ensured.
