DIY Korea
Sunday, November 14th, 2010We built a piece of furniture.
But before I go and show you the fruits of our efforts I’ll put in a little background info.
Korea’s national past-times are: Hiking, rotting in-hot-sauce-covered pieces of cabbage and Starcraft.
Note the absence of DIY.
There is NO Home Depot here. There’s little family run stores which do sell a variety of tools, pans,chicken wire, heaters/fans, dustbins and other general . . . . stuff-things. Now, these little stores do a nice job of getting you settled with generic tools, but they can’t get you stuff to use tools on. If you live in Seoul you’ll have at least 1 in walking distance. Probably 2. We have 3.
We asked around, weigooks, Koreans, locals, out-of-town-ers. There is nowhere in Korean that you can buy wood.
You ask a carpenter who will magic wood out of his ass and 3 days later will show up with a piece of furniture. If, then, you feel like you could do with an extra screw in there you go to your local family thingy and buy 2 screws and a screwdriver.
If I’m not mistaken that is how it works here.
Problem is: I don’t know any carpenters. And I don’t speak any Korean to communicate with the carpenter what I want, or even where I can find his office.
Now, there was an area in Seoul of interest. We’d walked along a canal near Euljiro some time ago and noticed a collection of these little family shops side by side. They lined the canal for a good couple of city blocks. So we planned an afternoon to explore these shops and see if we could find our lumber supplier there.
We started at Jongno 1 ga. Top left. We found our lumber, 5 hours later, at the bottom right (isn’t that how it always goes?). As a reference btw, east to west that runs 850 meters.
Before we found our wood, we’d found:
- Metal
- Glass
- Plastic
- Engravers
- Cloth
- Haberdasheries
- Fish
- Cooking supplies
- Baking supplies
- Printers
- Packagers
- Lights
- Electronics
- Screws
- Sewing machines
- Chairs
- Paper
- and much, much more
Aelle made a small photo report of this area, but she’ll need a couple more to capture all of it.
If, after graduation, I find myself with a lot of time on my hands I’ll try and map all these things out on the map above, post it on the internet and save a LOT of foreigners a lot of frustration.
Maybe some locals as well even.
You see, Korea is the country in East-Asia with the tallest people, but the furniture producers haven’t really picked up on this. My kitchen counter is 82 cm high. Working on that will get dishes washed and carrots chopped, but it also grows a mighty fine hernia. If you need any illustration of that, remember how you feel after a marathon dish-washing sessions and know that I’m a fair bit taller than you (If I’m not I really shouldn’t need to explain this problem, you live it every day).
Anyway, so the backstory is that I’m tall and wood is hard to find in Korea. Damn near took us 4 months to find the stuff. Damn. (2 days after purchasing wood I went back to the area for some specific tools and found that carpenter in a sidestreet off where we found our wood btw)
I’ve made furniture before so I was fairly confident in my abilities. Over this project I was to face 2 challenges. The first of my own choosing.
I wanted something pretty. NO screwholes and stuff. Smooth wood all the way.
This meant I worked with dowels and glue only. I suppose I could’ve cheated on the backboard, but who knows where that thing ends up, so I wanted to make sure it was pretty on all ends.
Here’s some of the pictures of the project.
The second challenge was inherent to the house we live in. Look at the last picture and see if you can spot it.
First, the distance at ground level between the wall and the cabinet is different. This is because the walls aren’t straight here. They’re about 3-4 degrees off level, they’re also warped (meaning curved), which will play a role when we put up shelves.
Second, note the gap between the cabinet and the table top on the right side. This is because the floors aren’t level either.
Have you ever tried making something straight when you can’t really trust your level? I stopped after the cabinet to get a mechanist square to try and contain all the little errors that had snuck into the design by using a spirit level on a non-level reference frame.
But there it is. 1000 mm high and a perfect height to do kitchen stuff on. We’re putting two shelves on that wall when we can get a [thingy which measures if there's current running through the wall, someone please tell me the name of this tool] to make sure I don’t screw up the wiring of the house putting these up.
For those of you that have really good memories may note a discrepancy between the second to last picture and one posted here.
For those of you that haven’t tasted our baked goods yet, we now have an oven. And about time it was, this keeps Raph out of trouble for hours at a time 
.
We combined the cabinet with solving a problem you might have noticed on an earlier reporting as well. This really is how wiring is done here. And the thing keeping the wires curled up like that are a hair-band and 2 clothing pins.
Before
After1
After2
Drilled a hole in the back of the cabinet, put the wifi box and the extension chord in the cabinet. Though I had to mount the router on the wall. It comes with a solid chord. The solid chord was, at some point presumably, pulled through the hole in the wall we have there and connected up on our roof to the city’s telecommunication grid. Obviously I wasn’t going to try that so with the help of two screws and some powertools that now hangs from the wall. There’s another extension chord behind the printer for easy access for the vacuum cleaner and my laptop
I still need to put the chord of the extension chord in a gutter of some kind. The cable swinging under the window there is for my laptop power. It’d be prettier if it was tucked away, but the nature of laptops is that they’re mobile. So I need something able to move more than something pretty.
Only serious problem remaining is that little rolled up chord on the printer there. Our printer came with a 1 meter USB cable. Didn’t quite cover all possibilities properly apparently. Easily fixed when next I go back to Euljiro though. I know exactly to go for a 3 meter A to B USB cable.
And if you’re lucky, I’ll draw it out and soon, so will you.
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Quote of the Day:
Some tool-men say “Why? “, this tool-man says “Why not? “ – Tim “the Toolman” Taylor
This tool-man’s wife says “Why me? – Jill Taylor
