Chapter 119
After coming out of Jiang Ning's house, Jiang Bai couldn't help but look back at the house upstairs that he had just entered.
The first phase has been completed and the landscaping outside has also been done. Many people who have seen Jiang Ning's house asked Manager Qian to arrange the decoration after buying the house. Some also hired people to decorate it themselves, but most people still want to decorate it to look like Jiang Ning's house, so they directly asked Manager Qian to copy Jiang Ning's decoration on a one-to-one basis.
There are also people who bought a smaller house and were reluctant to give up the 60-square-meter space occupied by the living room upstairs, so they asked to build a second floor directly. The height of the living room did not need to be that high, and the 60-square-meter space was enough for them to separate into three large rooms.
Manager Qian asked them if they wanted to do soundproofing. Some families were afraid of spending too much money. After all, buying a house has taken out all their savings, not to mention the renovation. They would save as much as possible. Some families wanted to move in as soon as possible. Seeing all the construction sites around, it was indeed very noisy, so they said they wanted soundproofing.
In fact, before Jiang Ning mentioned the need for sound insulation, Manager Qian had not remembered that sound insulation was necessary. Their model room had never been soundproofed.
Now, Manager Qian can earn a lot of extra money just by doing the interior decoration for the first phase of houses in their community, especially during the May Day holiday, when Jiang Ning came to sign the decoration contract for her villa with him.
Excluding the free large terrace, balcony, yard and attic, the total area of her villa is 600 square meters. There is also a basement underneath, which is not included in the house area.
According to Jiang Ning's request, he had already contacted the business of laying floor heating before May Day. After negotiating the price and signing the commission contract, he arranged for the people to lay floor heating to install floor heating in all the rooms of the house, including the basement.
Shanghai is not as cold as the north, and central heating is not possible, so the heating installed in Jiang Ning's villa is completely powered by electricity. Manager Qian just thought that for such a large villa, if all the floor heating was turned on, the daily electricity consumption would be a considerable amount.
Because he had already renovated Jiang Ning's duplex apartment and knew what her needs were for a house, he also specially found college students majoring in architectural design in a university in Shanghai to design Jiang Ning's villa.
The students studying house design did not expect that they would have the opportunity to practice before they graduated. They cherished this opportunity very much. After all, when the villa is decorated in the future, it will be their actual work. The college students were also very confident. After meeting Jiang Ning on May Day, they listened to many of Jiang Ning's ideas.
When the college student first received this job, his mind was full of thoughts about decorating Jiang Ning's villa into a work of art. He had all kinds of novel ideas, but all of these ideas were poured over his head with a basin of cold water by Jiang Ning.
Because Jiang Ning's requirements for his future residence are that it should be warm, comfortable, simple and bright.
Bright, that is the requirement for lighting. Manager Qian understood it, it’s a whole glass wall.
The single-story height of the villa is 4.2 meters, and there is no need to build partitions like an apartment, because the area is large enough. It is more than enough for Jiang Ning to live with his grandfather.
Jiang Ning definitely cannot take care of such a big house by himself. He will definitely need to hire at least two people to take care of the hygiene and food at home, so he needs to prepare a nanny room.
Although Jiang Ning did not live in a mansion in her previous life, she had seen quite a few of them. However, influenced by the small peasant economy, she did not waste space just because the villa was big enough. She tried her best to make use of every inch of space.
The villa area is located on a higher terrain. Generally speaking, even if there is a flood, it will not reach here. Except for the warehouse, Jiang Ning renovated the basement according to the area of the house. Not only did he lay floor heating, he also wanted to make an audio-visual room. When the time comes, he will buy a projector and watch movies at home.
This idea confused Manager Qian and the college students he hired to do the house design.
Forgive my lack of knowledge, but it turns out that you can set up a movie theater at home?
After that, the college student no longer dared to talk about designing it into a work of art. He just listened to Jiang Ning and said that he and Manager Qian were responsible for writing down Jiang Ning's needs, including a viewing area, fitness area, reception area, restaurant, kitchen, etc. All of these were completed on the basement floor.
In order to provide sufficient lighting, the walls of the reception area are all made of glass.
The kitchen is also fully equipped with a dishwasher, oven, range hood, etc.
The entire villa is decorated from top to bottom, and all the cabinets are floor-to-ceiling, which makes cleaning and maintenance convenient.
Jiang Ning also requested that an elevator be installed in the villa.
After listening to this, Manager Qian and the college student were already embarrassed.
Including the basement and the three-story attic, there are four floors in total. You can't install an elevator in the attic, right? Isn’t it just a three-story house? What kind of elevator are you installing?
And what kind of floor heating do you have in your basement? What a waste of money. The basement alone is 300 square meters, and she didn't leave the attic area alone. Everything had to be designed well to make full use of the space. With her design, the 600-square-meter house can at least give the effect of 1,000 square meters.
Jiang Ning only had three days of May Day holiday. During these three days, she was discussing the design plan of the villa with Manager Qian and the college student designer. The final design plan was finalized, and the decoration cost alone could buy another big house.
But Jiang Ning didn't care. She had already received the royalties for the fourth and fifth volumes of the physical books. The popularity of "Justice Bao II" made the publishing of "The Song Dynasty" earn a lot of money. The publishing house kept reprinting the books, and her royalties were enough to support her decoration.
In fact, her decoration is not luxurious, it can even be called simple. This is an era, electrical appliances are expensive, and the floor heating for two floors plus a basement, 900 square meters, is not cheap, and the elevator is not cheap either.
But Manager Qian and the college student were quite excited. Once the decoration was completed and they took photos, one of them could use it as a case study for their own villa decoration, and the other could use it as a case study for their own design. In the future, if clients with villas wanted to decorate their villas, they could ask them to decorate them or come to them for decoration, just like they did with the apartment they decorated for Jiang Ning. This case study would allow clients to see their actual decoration results.
So, on the basis of meeting Jiang Ning's actual requirements for the house, the designer also had to take aesthetics into consideration. How to design and decorate Jiang Ning's house so that it is practical and beautiful at the same time? For this purpose, the college student also called two classmates with whom he had a good relationship to help with the design reference. Now the house has been renovated for three months, but it is not yet completed.
Jiang Bai found Manager Qian and asked where they wanted to eat.
Manager Qian then remembered that everything else in Jiang Ning's house had been completed except for one thing: there was no gas connection in this apartment, so if he wanted to cook, he had to call a gas delivery man to send up a tank of gas. In addition, although the kitchen was decorated, there were currently no tableware such as pots and pans. In other words, if Jiang Bai lived here for a short period of time, it would be fine, but if he lived here for a long time, he would need to prepare pots and pans and other daily necessities himself.
Jiang Bai certainly doesn't live here long term. He will be living on campus after school starts, and this is just a temporary residence.
After knowing that Jiang Bai was a college student who was about to enroll, Manager Qian said, "The construction site next door is under construction. They sell boxed lunches at lunch time, but the number of boxed lunches they cook every day is limited. If there are three of you and you need three more, I will tell the boxed lunch seller next door to add three more. The boxed lunches are one yuan each."
When Jiang Bai heard this, he was surprised that the lunch boxes were so expensive. If he had three meals a day, it would cost at least three dollars, right? The three of them spend ten dollars a day just on food.
He wanted to buy himself an electric rice cooker, buy some vegetables, and cook rice, which would be clean and hygienic.
In this respect, he and Jiang Ma are exactly alike. He always complains that the food outside is dirty and unhygienic. If he can cook by himself, he will never order food from outside. In fact, he just wants to save money.
During this period, the only thing that is more expensive is the rice cooker, but the rice cooker is not something that can be used once and then become unusable. When my sister comes over in the future, the rice cooker can still be used.
He shared his idea with Tong Jingang and Tong's father, and Tong's father also agreed.
He and Tong's mother both have fixed salaries. Although his unit has good benefits, the salary is fixed, especially in a system like his. It increases every year, but the increase is limited. It is not easy for two people to support Tong Jingang, a college student.
Before 1994, going to university was subsidized by the government and basically free. Note ①
But since the reform began in 1995, tuition fees have increased. This year, universities have started the unified system. University tuition fees have increased from 200 yuan last year to 1,300 yuan this year. This does not include the textbook fee of 150 yuan per academic year. In other words, the tuition for one year at university alone is 1,500 yuan.
This seems to be similar to the current high school tuition, but the accommodation fee in university is higher than that in high school. In high school, students can exchange grain for food coupons and go to school and go home for meals, but this is not the case in university. Therefore, on the basis of the fifteen hundred yuan, at least another five hundred yuan of living expenses must be added.
It costs at least two thousand yuan a year.
How much does a worker earn at this time? The overall price has increased this year, to 300 to 400 yuan a month, and in big cities it may have increased to 500 or 600 yuan.
Tong's mother works at a hospital in Wucheng, and currently earns only more than 300 yuan a month.
For example, Grandpa Jiang's salary for the mountain patrol job increased this year to 100 yuan a month. If the child was from a rural area, the annual salary of Grandpa Jiang would not be enough to cover the child's tuition and miscellaneous fees.
This was also the reason why Jiang Ning was in such financial difficulty in her previous life even though she already had the salary subsidy from Grandpa Jiang.
Grandpa Jiang’s annual salary is not enough to support her tuition for one year. She has to find ways to get the rest from other places. Grandpa Jiang’s mountain patrol job limits his daily range of movement. He will not go out of Jiangjia Village at most, and he cannot stay in Jiangjia Village all the time. How long will it take him to accumulate one or two dollars from the rubbish of a village? Even if one relies on picking some bracken heads and bamboo shoots to sell in spring, the money earned might only be enough to cover two boat trips.
For example, Tong Jingang's family is a dual-income family. One of his parents' annual salary is invested in Tong Jingang, leaving only one's salary. Tong's father and mother also have to make a living, so for Tong's father, he also saves as much as possible.
The registration time for each school is different. The registration time for freshmen at Jiang Bai's Shanghai University of Technology is August 24th, and the registration time for Tong Jingang's school is August 27th.
They arrived in Shanghai in advance. After the three of them put their luggage away, Jiang Bai went to Manager Qian and asked him where the nearby vegetable market was. Manager Qian told them the bus route, and the three of them took the bus to the city to buy pots, pans, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, meat, eggs and vegetables.
When he came back, Jiang Bai went to Manager Qian's sales office to borrow a phone and called Jiang's father.
Every day, when I called Jiang's father, he would be there only between 9:30 and 10 in the morning and between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. The rest of the time, he was either purchasing goods or selling lunch boxes at the train station, so I couldn't find him.
Jiang Bai finally waited until this time and told his father that the university did not accept rice, so he had to use an IC meal card and recharge it with money before he could eat.
Jiang's father has made money now, so he is not stingy with Jiang Bo and said, "I'll transfer the money to you now."
After hanging up the phone, he went back to ask Jiang Ma for the passbook.
Mother Jiang looked at him warily: "Why do you want the passbook?" She was afraid that Father Jiang might know someone who would borrow money from him, and that he would lend out the money they had worked so hard to earn.
When he lent out the money, she went to those families and made a scene, crying and threatening, until they got the money back to pay off their debts.
Jiang's father smiled helplessly and said, "Baizi is studying at Shanghai University. He can no longer bring food from home to exchange for food coupons at school like before. Now he has to pay with the IC meal card, and the money is charged into the meal card."
Jiang Ma asked, "How much does it cost?"
She counted on her fingers: "One dollar a day, thirty dollars a month, a semester is four months, you transfer one hundred and twenty dollars to him."
Father Jiang said helplessly: "Baizi is already 18 years old, it's time for him to eat, one dollar a day is not enough? Our lunch box is one dollar a box."
Jiang's mother glared at him: "Don't think I don't know. How can the price of the meals sold in the school be the same as our lunch boxes? When Guoan and Guoliang went to college, they didn't have to pay a penny for tuition, and the government even subsidized them." She muttered in dissatisfaction: "When it's my turn to go to college, the tuition and miscellaneous fees are nearly two thousand a year!"
"You can still support one now, but in two years, you will have to support another. Fortunately, you made some money from selling lunch boxes this year, otherwise, if you want to support two college students, you will have to beg for food~!"
He reluctantly handed the passbook to Jiang's father and added, "Don't give me a penny more!"
But when Jiang's father came back, Jiang's mother found that three hundred yuan was missing from the passbook and muttered, "They just know how to spend money!"
Nothing else was said.
No matter how much she favored Jiang Song, she knew that Jiang Bai was now a college student and would at least have a stable job in the future. Although she had made up her mind to live with her eldest son, if he married a wife with whom she did not get along, she still had her younger son.
The younger son is a down-to-earth person, without any ulterior motives. If she can't get along with her eldest daughter-in-law in the future, she won't have a bad life with the younger son.
Although she has never been to school and is illiterate, she still has the necessary wisdom for survival and has her own ideas in her heart.
After Jiang Bai knew that Jiang's father had given him 300 yuan for meals, he did the math and felt that it was almost enough.
Father Jiang said, "The 300 yuan is the money you put into your meal card for meals. I also transferred another 100 yuan to you for living expenses. If it's not enough, call me again."
The one hundred yuan he subsidized privately was his private money.
The vegetable market he and Tong's father went to today was a wholesale market. The vegetables were very cheap, and chicken legs were also cheap. He bought a lot of frozen chicken legs today and put them in his sister's refrigerator. He thought that he could go to the vegetable market to buy some vegetables every week and cook them at his sister's place, just like when he was in high school, and bring a big canning jar to school. In this way, the money in the meal card can be used to buy rice, and the meat and vegetables can be eaten with the ones he brought.
But this can only be done after October at least. It is still too hot now and the cooked food cannot be kept.
He is still thinking about how to make money.
When his sister is not around, he feels uneasy, as if his heart is floating in the air with nowhere to rest.
When Jiang Bai walked to the door of Jiang Ning's house again, he still felt a little unreal.
He knocked on the door first to see if the original owner had returned. After making sure that there was no one inside, he carefully took out the key, opened the door, and looked inside. After seeing that there was really no one inside, Jiang Bai and Tong Jingang walked in with confidence.
As soon as Tong Jingang entered, he sat on the sofa, stretched his arms on the sofa back, crossed his legs, and asked Jiang Bai with a smile: "Baizi, take a look, do I look like Chen Haonan like this?" He said regretfully: "If I had a camera, I could take a few photos of me from this angle. I would definitely look handsome!"
Tong's father couldn't help but laugh when he saw the two boys in front of him looking around like thieves. After hearing what Tong Jingang said, he urged him, "Let Baizi take a break. Go put the food in the refrigerator. It's too hot. Don't let it go bad." He also reminded him, "Put the chicken legs in the freezer."
He carried his food to the kitchen to cook.
Jiang Bai was embarrassed to ask Tong's father to cook, but Tong's father was used to cooking at home, so he smiled and said, "You two take a break, leave this to me, don't worry, it will be ready in a while."
There was a refrigerator in Jiang Ning's house. Manager Qian had introduced it to them before, so they knew how to use it. After plugging it in, Tong Jingang put the chicken legs and cured duck legs he bought in the freezer and the vegetables in the refrigerator. Tong's father washed the pot and washed the rice, while Jiang Bai washed the vegetables and cut the cured duck legs.
Jiang Ning has already set up the gas stove in the kitchen. All he needs is a gas tank and a wok to cook.
But Jiang Bai had limited money, and buying an electric rice cooker was a big item for him. Today's rice, eggs and dishes were paid for by Tong's father. He and Tong Jingang would be staying in Jiang Ning's house for several days, so it was not a good idea to let Jiang Bai pay for everything.
The three of them were eating at the table in Jiang Ning Restaurant, enjoying the meal with great satisfaction.
Tong Jingang washed the dishes. Jiang Bai returned to the guest room and touched the brand new European and American palace-style four-piece set on the bed with intricate and gorgeous patterns. He didn't dare to sleep on it, for fear of dirtying his sister's sheets and bedspreads.
Besides, it was summer and there was no mat on the bed. The thick quilt and bedding looked hot. Jiang Bai, who was reluctant to turn on the air conditioner, discussed with Tong Jingang and Tong's father and decided to sleep on the floor.
Jiang Bai and Tong Jingang both brought cool mats.
Wucheng is a major producer of mats. During the non-rice-planting season, you can see grass for weaving mats on both sides of the road, neatly cut and drying on both sides of the road. Many unemployed people in Wucheng receive the grass for weaving mats and go home to weave mats to earn some wages.
Therefore, straw mats are sold very cheaply in Wucheng.
Jiang Ning's room was covered with wooden floors. It looked very clean because Manager Qian and Yang Meirong came to clean it occasionally. Jiang Bai originally didn't want to turn on the air conditioner, but Tong Jingang really wanted to experience the feeling of having air conditioning in summer, so the three of them decided to sleep on the floor in the same room at night so that they could all enjoy the air conditioning.
In the middle of the night, Jiang Bai was awakened by the cold. Looking at the unfamiliar environment around him, he suddenly felt as if he was a guest in a dream and could not tell whether this was a dream or reality.
He sat up for a long time before he got up and walked to the living room. He originally wanted to take a quilt in, but somehow he walked to the floor-to-ceiling window alone and looked at the silent night outside.
It is too hot in the summer, so people on the construction site have to get up very early in the morning and work very late. When the sun is scorching at noon, they can go back to take a nap for a few hours and then continue working at three in the afternoon.
It was quiet outside at this time.
In 1996, Shanghai had not yet become the Magic City it later became. Stars could be seen above the city in the east of Hudong.
Jiang Bai looked up and saw the starry sky through the glass ceiling on the balcony.
Click, the lights in the living room were turned on. Tong Jingang rubbed his eyes and saw Jiang Bai standing alone on the balcony looking at the stars. He stood beside him, looked up at the sky, walked to the balcony, and looked down through the glass window at Hudong, which was still under construction.
The total height of the houses in this community is only six floors, but because the height of each floor is 6.2 meters, the total height still seems quite high.
Jiang Ning bought a house on the third floor. Unlike those high-rise residential buildings with dozens of floors, he could not see the entire Hudong area, but only the Huangpu River outside.
Unfortunately, there were no street lights outside at that time, and it was pitch dark and I couldn’t see anything.
"Let's go, let's go back to sleep." He pulled Jiang Bai and shook off the hairs on his body: "I'm freezing to death!"
It was the first time for Tong Jingang to be woken up by the cold in the summer.
It was their first time turning on the air conditioner, and they thought it was summer, so they wanted to keep things cool, so they set the temperature as low as possible. They set it to 22 degrees, and they were all woken up by the cold.
After Jiang Bai returned, he soon heard the snoring of Tong Jingang and Tong's father. He thought he would not be able to sleep, but he didn't know when he fell asleep on the cold mat, covered with a blanket, and fell asleep unknowingly.
On the next day, Tong's father and Tong Jingang went together to take Jiang Bai to register.
Jiang Ning's results for the city competition came out, and as expected, Jiang Ning got first place in two subjects.
When the competition results came out, the teacher who printed out the rankings was very curious when he saw Jiang Ning ranked first in two subjects, "Which school is this Jiang Ning from?"
Since the ranking only showed names and scores but no schools, everyone just assumed they were a few old-school key schools that were the main forces in the competition, and no one paid much attention.
When they were about to notify the top 50 students in each subject to come to the city for training, they discovered that Jiang Ning was actually from Wucheng No. 1 Middle School.
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