Chapter 170: Building a Earthen Kang
Dahe Village.
Cheng Wanwan asked Cheng Zhao for a piece of the worst quality coarse paper and sat down at the table to start drawing.
Half an hour ago, she secretly bought the blueprints for building a brick bed in the mall and studied them in the inner room for a long time before she dared to start drawing. She just needed to draw it according to the actual situation of her current house. It was actually not that difficult.
The structure of the house is the simplest one in the village. There is a main room in the middle, and several inner rooms are spread out on the east and west sides. At the back are the kitchen and bathroom, and then the toilet. Next to the toilet are chicken coops and duck sheds. The manure pit is connected to the wasteland at the back. After the wasteland is dug up, it can be used directly as fertilizer.
The stove in the kitchen is connected to the kang (heated brick bed) in the inner room, so you can heat the kang directly while cooking, which is very convenient.
However, with so many rooms in the house, it was impossible to build a kang (heated brick bed) in every room. So she chose her own room and Zhao Sidan's room to build a large kang. When it was freezing cold, the men and women slept on separate kangs, which was incredibly warm.
After finishing the blueprints, Cheng Wanwan immediately went to find Zhao Anjiang. Zhao Anjiang was directing the digging of the foundation on the wasteland. Usually, when building a house in the village, the foundation is dug one and a half feet deep, but Cheng Wanwan demanded that it be dug two feet deep. Only with a solid foundation would the house be more stable.
"Tiezhu's dad, come here for a second." Cheng Wanwan called him over. "Can you understand this diagram?"
Zhao Anjiang carefully took the paper, read it through it thoroughly, and after a moment, said, "It means that when building the house, you should build an earthen bed inside. I think a wooden bed would be better. Your father-in-law, Uncle Zhao, knows how to make beds, so asking him to help make a few beds wouldn't be a big deal..."
Cheng Wanwan explained it carefully, trying to make the principle of the earthen bed as easy to understand as possible: "...The channel in the middle of the earthen bed is for burning fuel. The smoke from burning fuel goes out through this channel, so you won't be cold sleeping on the kang in winter..."
Zhao Anjiang exclaimed in surprise, "Auntie Dashan, how did you come up with this idea?"
Cheng Wanwan coughed and said, "I often go to the city, and I overheard people mention earthen kangs. I heard that in the colder parts of the north, every household has one. Even though we're in the south, people can still freeze to death in winter. If earthen kangs really work, we can have a warm winter this year."
Zhao Anjiang raised a practical question: "I'm afraid he's a bit of a good-for-nothing."
"That's why the earthen bed and stove are connected. The firewood burning in the stove is shoveled into the kang (heated brick bed), and a handful of rice husks are scattered in. By the time you go to sleep at night, the kang will be warm. Actually, it doesn't use much firewood." Cheng Wanwan asked, "Is this work difficult?"
"It's not difficult at all, not difficult at all." Zhao Anjiang carefully put the blueprints away. "Leave this to me, Aunt Dashan can rest assured!"
Cheng Wanwan was naturally relieved.
She looked at the busy crowd. There were already more than forty people working that day. With many hands, the foundation was almost finished in just one or two days. After backfilling, construction would officially begin. The blue bricks also needed to be transported back as soon as possible. They would use the blue bricks to build the foundation and then build the walls with adobe bricks. Of course, the roof could not be thatched. She had already asked the village head to order the tiles. The tiles cost one copper coin each, and the tiles needed for all the rooms in her house would cost close to ten taels of silver.
After Cheng Wanwan finished speaking with Zhao Anjiang, she went to Zhao the hunter's house.
Halfway there, they met Granny Zhang and her niece Li Xiuhong. While many of the village girls were working in the fields in patched and tattered clothes, Li Xiuhong stood out in her bright pink jacket.
Mrs. Zhang smiled and said, "Hey, Dashan Niang, where are you going?"
Cheng Wanwan said casually, "Just take a walk. My hometown is very busy, and there's mud and yellow dust everywhere. If you don't have anything to do, don't go there."
Granny Zhang twitched the corners of her mouth and said, "We're not going to your house. I'll take Xiuhong to the village head's house for a while."
She pulled Li Xiuhong away, saying as they walked, "Do you really think our Zhang family wants Cheng Zhao as a son-in-law? Old Madam Cheng is such a miser, she probably can't even come up with half a tael of silver for the bride price. The Zhang family wouldn't even look at her! Humph, our Xiuhong is as beautiful as a flower, she could marry a rich tycoon, she absolutely cannot suffer with a poor scholar..."
"Auntie, please stop..."
Li Xiuhong blushed deeply, afraid that Cheng Wanwan would hear her words.
She had been living in Dahe Village for a while and knew that Dashan's mother was very influential in the village. Her aunt said bad things about the Cheng family, which was obviously going against Dashan's mother. They would see each other all the time in the future, which would be very awkward.
Cheng Wanwan acted as if she hadn't heard and continued walking forward.
As long as they don't harm her children, she really can't control what else happens.
She went to Zhao the hunter's house to pick up the game that Zhao Ergou had ordered. Zhao the hunter would set the trap the day before and go to the mountain to find game early the next morning. Last night, a fawn fell into the trap, and he brought the wild deer back this morning. It had already been cleaned, with the meat and internal organs separated and neatly arranged.
It weighs thirty-nine catties in total. The meat costs fifteen coins, and the offal costs ten coins.
After paying, Cheng Wanwan was about to leave with the goods when she turned her head and saw a little girl squatting on the ground in the yard feeding rabbits.
The rabbit's belly was round and swollen, clearly indicating that it was pregnant.
Hunter Zhao said a little embarrassedly, "I caught a wild rabbit a while ago, and my daughter insisted on keeping it. We had just finished the autumn harvest, and we had some food at home, so I let her do it. I didn't expect it to be a pregnant female rabbit. I'm afraid this litter will have five or six babies."
Cheng Wanwan remembered seeing a news report in her past life that an adult female rabbit can give birth six or seven times a year on average, with five to ten rabbits born each time. In other words, if you raise one male and one female rabbit, the rabbits born can be paired up and reproduce, and after a year there could probably be more than a hundred rabbits.
Braised rabbit meat is just as delicious as braised pork offal, and the meat is even more tender. People in this era would probably find it hard to resist.
Seeing Cheng Wanwan staring intently at the rabbit, Hunter Zhao tentatively suggested, "How about I give you the mother rabbit to stew after this litter of rabbits is born?"
"Ah, no, no, no!" Cheng Wanwan hurriedly waved her hands. "The mother rabbit still has to take care of the baby rabbits, why are you in such a hurry to eat? I was just thinking, when the baby rabbits grow up, could you give me a male and a female baby rabbit?"
Hunter Zhao agreed without hesitation: "Of course!"
Cheng Wanwan thought for a moment and then said, "You know a lot of hunters, see if you can help me find out if any of them have ewes that have given birth to lambs."
In two or three months, my eldest daughter-in-law's baby will be born. My eldest daughter-in-law has a very poor health condition. If she doesn't have enough breast milk, we'll have to buy formula. It's okay to feed formula to dogs without having to explain to anyone. But I can't just take my eldest daughter-in-law's baby aside and secretly feed him formula. It's fine during the day, but if the baby gets hungry in the middle of the night, I'll have to get up to pee. Just thinking about it makes me want to give up.
If there were a milk-producing ewe, all of this wouldn't be a big problem, and we could even make some dairy products.
Hunter Zhao nodded without hesitation. Not long ago, a hunter he knew caught a wild goat. The goat had a round belly and was probably pregnant. He just didn't know if the goat had been slaughtered after more than a month.
Cheng Wanwan returned home in a good mood and saw Zheng Wangfeng and Qian Hui, the two young masters, standing at the door looking around.
The courtyard was full of people working, each man covered in mud and sweat, and the ground was also covered in mud. The two young masters did not want to get their brocade boots dirty, so they hesitated to step inside.
The men who were working had no idea how to deal with the rich young master, so they all pretended not to see him.
Cheng Wanwan came in from outside, and couldn't pretend she didn't see the two men, so she politely asked, "Young Master Zheng, Young Master Qian, what are you two doing standing here?"
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