Chapter 56: The Road to the Fifty-Six Workshops
A few days later, in early May, the vegetables and beans planted in the fields outside the manor all sprouted. The temperature was just right, and they grew differently every day.
The wheat that had been sown had only grown leaves two inches long, and the tenant farmers had nothing to do with the expansion.
After they finished sowing the existing arable land, they began to go to the hillside in groups to reclaim wasteland. This year's task was to reclaim 20 acres of new arable land.
They set out early in the morning and returned home at dusk. Each team competed with each other to get the bonus promised by the steward and the miller.
The team that turns the soil the deepest, digs the most, and removes the rocks the cleanest will receive extra salary for all members.
The housekeeper followed the lady's instructions and beat each of the tenant farmers separately.
Inside the manor walls, dozens of workers came and went.
The fruit trees were the first to be removed, and the tamping of the foundation, the digging of deep wells, and the excavation of cellars were also the first tasks that the craftsmen were asked to do.
Once the foundation work is ready, we will start building the main building.
A total of ten carpenters, ten stonemasons, ten bricklayers for building the walls, forty laborers, and ten handymen were used.
Several women who were tenant farmers in the village were also hired to help the kitchen cook large pots of meals for the workers and distribute the food.
The laborers were divided into two teams, each consisting of twenty people.
Each group sent twelve people to quarry stones and cut wood from the area planned by the steward.
The remaining eight items were transported on flatbed carts, and were brought back to the house one trip at a time.
They were pulled to the front of the house and then handed over to the carpenters and stonemasons respectively.
They plane the wood flat, hammer the irregular stones flat, process them into various sizes according to the architect's requirements, and arrange them in different categories.
These things are very particular. What kind of stones are used for foundations and paving the ground, what kind of stones are used for walls, what kind of stones are used for windows, stoves, and fireplaces are all different.
There was also various kinds of wood for beams and fastenings, some wet wood dug from the forest, some dry wood bought in town.
Ten masons took the stones and wood to where they should be, mixed them with a large amount of yellow mud or lime, and built it according to Sloch's requirements.
As for the handymen, they move wherever they are needed, helping to fetch water, pour ash, and unload materials.
Slochi was a two-star builder after all, and he was very organized and meticulous when supervising the project, not sloppy at all.
He came to the manor from town every day, and worked with the housekeeper to urge the workers to start work. He managed these dozens of people so that their work ran smoothly and there was no conflict at all.
It's just that Slochi has a strange personality. When he stays in the manor, he doesn't eat from the big pot. Whenever he is hungry, he asks the cook for good meat and delicious dishes.
In order to maintain order in the construction, soldiers from both estates followed Caesar to watch the workers work, and the patrol was entrusted to nearby neighbors to help keep an eye on them.
Even if there were private disagreements among the workers, and they complained to each other while working, they would not dare to make trouble when they saw those young and energetic soldiers holding sharp spears, wearing armor and chains.
These workers had worked in the monastery for three months and were all skin and bones from hunger. They were all in their fifties and could not bear a beating from the soldiers.
During the day, the noise of sawing wood and banging stones in the manor was so loud that it hurt people's ears and prevented them from getting any sleep.
So, Olivia got up every day and didn't eat a meal at home. After washing up, she rode her horse back to Renault Manor to hide and have three meals a day.
After dinner time, when the workers had stopped working, she returned, leaving Caesar alone to supervise the work at the estate.
Therefore, a lot of work was saved in the kitchen. The lady went to Renault Manor for dinner, and the adults also went there for three meals a day. The kitchen only needed to cook big pots of meals for the workers.
The workers' daily meals consisted of two meals of rye porridge, and minced meat and bean soup every other day, which contained either smoked fish or pickled meat, all of which were hunted by the soldiers or collected previously. It was heavy in salt and oil, and no one complained of feeling weak after eating it.
This is much better than when they worked for the monastery.
As for salaries, they are distributed according to different levels.
Bricklayers who build walls, craftsmen who handle stones and wood, and laborers who dig out raw materials are paid a higher wage, four sori a day.
The handyman was paid three sori a day, and the tenant farmer hired from the village to help cook in the kitchen was paid two sori a day.
Because the house to be built only covers an area of 180 square meters and has only two floors, and there are many people working on it, it can be considered a saturation job and it can be completed in about one and a half months.
The housekeeper roughly calculated that the wages for each person would cost fifteen or sixteen gold coins in a month and a half.
Including the architect's salary and bonus, it cost exactly twenty gold coins.
During this period, nothing happened outside and someone was taking care of the work in the manor. Olivia was very idle and went to Renault Manor every day to relax.
Ethan and Adam are now in charge of the affairs of those workshop owners. The expansion of the manor will naturally be handled by the housekeeper and the architect, and these two little guys can't help much.
Although the two of them were not very old, they were taken seriously by all the skilled self-employed farmers.
The two of them divided the money among themselves. From then on, Adam was in charge of the cashier, and Ethan was responsible for quality inspection of the goods.
These workshops are currently being expanded, and the two are also responsible for supervision.
Adam and Ethan went out every day to check if Antona's fishing boat was out, and helped old Duke renovate the earthen kiln and helped little Bruce renovate the loom.
These two people didn't have such good intentions originally, but this was the business that the lady wanted to support, so they watched them do the work and asked if there was a better way. Adam and Ethan went up to give them some advice.
While the manor was never under construction, these three workshops were expanding and upgrading their equipment.
Once bricklaying began in the manor, the tools in these workshops were upgraded and put into operation.
The one who made the fastest progress was Antona.
She doesn't have to build her own fishing boat; she buys a ready-made one directly from the town. Because there is a river, there are professional fishermen in many nearby villages, and goods can be transported by water, so there are also many boat builders.
Thanks to the support of her wife, her boat was the most expensive in the fishing boat shop, worth nearly a gold coin. It was made of oak, could carry ten people, had six oars, could bear a weight of two thousand pounds, and had one thousand pounds of space left after being fully loaded.
A hemp rope was tied to the stern of the boat and led all the way to a tree on the shore to prevent it from capsizing.
When she went to the river, she usually hired three other adult farmers in the village to act as rowers, and also hired two people from the neighboring village to help lower the nets and pull in fish. These people were part-time workers and were paid according to the amount of fish they caught.
They can make three or four trips back and forth between the deep waters of the river and the shore in a day. If they are unlucky, they can catch more than a dozen big fish in a day.
If you are lucky, you can catch forty or fifty big fish weighing hundreds of pounds in a day.
After bringing these fish home, Antona's children and the women from the village who come to work part-time to earn pocket money will help screen them.
A bucket of fresh fish and shrimp was delivered to the manor every day. No matter how much was left, they would be gutted, salted and pickled for a few days, and then dried in the yard.
Her house was built next to her farmland and had a spacious yard.
In order to prevent wild cats and strangers in the village from coveting the yard, Antona asked her neighbors to help her enclose the yard with a wooden fence and let her family guard the door, making it look like a workshop.
Even the work of weeding and replanting in the fields was left to the neighbors to help.
After these fish and shrimps are dried in the sun for two or three days, the number will be counted and handed over to Adam and Ethan.
Adam and Ethan counted the goods and took them to a shop in the town they had business with. Although the difference was not much, even if it was only one suri per fish, as long as the quantity reached a certain scale, they could still earn a few silver coins a month.
After Antona's fishing business developed, she stopped accepting any mountain products.
Antona knew that when it came to business, she had to be precise and not excessive, and she couldn't try to control everything herself, or else people around her would dislike her, so she gave up on her own initiative.
This mountain product business was divided up by other self-cultivating farmers, and later they also opened workshops.
Let’s talk about making earthenware.
At first, Old Duke was very nervous about the money given by his wife and the promise that he could cut down a few trees every month. He dreamed every night that he had messed up things and the duck that was about to be caught flew away.
Old Duke's wife was smart. She went to other places in the town to look at kilns and bowls, hired a mason who had built earthen kilns in the town, and bought two carts of stone bricks before she built the new kiln.
After the new kiln was built, Ethan came to his house and watched them fetch mud from the river, sift it, wash it, settle it, homogenize it, throw it into the pottery, and dry it.
Ethan didn't know what was wrong, but as he watched Old Duke work, he suddenly started studying the mud he collected.
And the mud collected from different places and the dried clay blocks.
Later, Ethan went to the place where he collected mud, found a magnet, and searched around.
Later, Ethan pointed to a place by the river and asked Old Duke to go there to collect mud and try making molds.
We also collected mud from several other places for comparison.
These mud mining sites are located far apart from each other. Some are on the river bank, some are in the valley, and some are in the fief of the former Toksun Manor.
Old Duke was stunned by what he was told, and did as Ethan said.
After they were fired in batches, Ethan took out all the pottery fired with different clays and knocked them.
The Duke family had been collecting clay from everywhere to make pottery, but they had never carefully studied the differences.
Ethan knocked over the pottery and smashed it all to pieces, letting Old Duke see how the pottery looked when it was broken.
Now, you can more intuitively distinguish between good and bad.
The mud collected from the valley in the former Toksun Manor is white in color and the pottery fired from it has a fine texture.
Ethan helped with the preparation for two days. He also made new tools for processing the mud and added a process of brushing water on the blanks, which reduced the small cracks. He also asked people to improve the techniques and tools for throwing the blanks, and to extend the time for each kiln firing.
Although Ethan had no experience in kiln firing before, these inertial ideas that popped into his mind did not go wrong in any step.
Sometimes, old Duke and his wife would scratch their heads, wondering if Ethan was a kiln master in his previous life, who stayed in heaven for a few days and was sent back by the Creator God to be reborn as a human being.
How can someone be so gifted?
Although the process after Ethan's transformation is extremely complicated and only enough for three firings per month, the dozens of pottery pieces fired each time are of very good quality.
…
Last month, Letilen earned more than thirty gold coins from his business, which was equivalent to the store's profit for half a year. The cooperation in this business was surprisingly harmonious and there was no trouble at all.
Through this, he made up his mind to do more business with Olivia and others in the future.
These days, finding a reliable and steady business partner who won't cause trouble is harder than trying to find an elephant in the ocean.
Because the owner of the store where Olivia ordered furniture was a relative, he went there every day to help oversee the progress and look for good things himself, such as silver spoons and forks, glass pepper shakers, and copper flower pots. He wanted to give them as gifts when the manor was repaired.
Occasionally, he would return to his shop every two days to check the accounts on the counter.
As luck would have it, one day, he met Ethan who came to deliver pottery to old Duke's family.
The pottery made by Old Duke's family is getting better and better, so Ethan and Adam have the nerve to send it to Letilen's shop.
When Letilen saw it, he personally inspected the pottery. He took a look and found that the sound was crisp like knocking on iron, and the color was beige brown. It looked smooth and had a delicate touch.
Upon learning that this was made by the clay workshop in the manor, Letilen raised his eyebrows.
"Compared to the clay workshops in the city, few can produce such high quality products. From now on, you don't have to send the goods from the manor elsewhere. Just bring them to me."
While talking to Adam and Ethan, the men beside him were unloading the goods from the truck. Letilan took a deep soup bowl with two handles in his hand and observed it carefully.
Most pottery is inexpensive, costing between a few soli and one koli.
Rich merchants and nobles didn't like to use it. Most of the people who used pottery were ordinary people in the town.
Therefore, the demand is huge. In his grocery store, dozens of them can be sold in a single day when the market is good.
The batch of goods delivered today is a total of eighty pieces, including twenty-five shallow plates, twenty-five deep plates, twenty deep soup bowls with two handles, and ten large soup pots. None of them are damaged.
The purchase price of each piece, Letilen calculated, was six souris for various plates and eight souris for large jars.
The price is one-third higher than other pottery.
He paid Adam and Ethan, and chatted for a while, asking about the progress of the house construction on the manor and whether there was anything missing.
Outside, Ethan rarely talks to people.
Adam shook his head: "Nothing is missing. We are laying the foundation today..."
After talking for a while, Adam and Ethan returned to the manor with a few silver coins in their pockets.
Adam and Ethan bought pottery from Old Duke for only three or four suries, and they made half of the profit in one round trip.
They didn't have any toll costs, and the soldiers guarding the gate were now under the command of Old Renault. The total value of the goods was no more than a few silver coins, so it was not a big deal in the eyes of the tax officer, and they didn't even have to owe him a favor.
Later, Letilen sold the pottery at different prices, with the lowest price being eight souris and the large jar being sold for one kori.
It is obviously more expensive than other pottery, but after selling it for a few days, this one is more popular.
There was a tavern in town that sold bread and sausages. On the first day, I just came to buy a pot of soup.
The next day, he came and bought ten shallow plates and five jars, saying that this pottery looked more upscale than other red pottery.
Now, restaurants in the town came to his shop one after another, and rushed to place orders, driving the price up to more than a pound, but Letilen really was out of stock.
This pottery is expensive, but it is more durable than wood and ten times cheaper than metal.
As long as the quality is better, it is normal to be popular.
Letilen immediately went to the manor in person, found Adam and Ethan, and ordered 200 shallow plates and 100 soup cans, the same kind as the previous batch.
Old Duke couldn't take orders privately, and Letilen was also very disciplined and never bypassed Adam and Ethan.
Ethan and Adam agreed to Letilen's request, and said that one furnace could only burn about a hundred pieces of goods at most, and these goods would be delivered to him in three batches.
When Duke, the bowl maker, saw that his sales were increasing and he was planning to expand the kiln, Adam and Ethan did not allow him to expand too much and only expanded one kiln.
It is stipulated that no more than one thousand pieces of goods can be shipped each month.
As for the reason, neither of them understood, and they just said they were following the lady's instructions.
When Old Duke heard that it was his wife's order, he immediately gave up his thoughts.
In the past, another family made wine in this manor.
Their family simply used the wheat from the manor to make wine for the deceased old knight, and kept one or two barrels for themselves. After being discovered, the old knight was furious and sent them to court.
The court of Lavossen sentenced the whole family to dig stones for the Baron, and they were worked to death.
Old Duke thought that the soil he took was also the property of the manor. If he messed around with it, he might end up like that family.
Olivia seems to be riding a horse out to enjoy the mountains and rivers every day, but in fact she knows everything about the manor very well.
After the clay workshop was built, Ethan and Adam, who were both talented in construction, were assigned to coordinate it. As expected, thanks to their transformation, the workshop had a qualitative improvement, just as planned.
However, the current clay workshop is of just the right size, with two kilns, small but fine. She can make a few silver coins from reselling the goods from one kiln, and more than a few gold coins a month.
No one would look down upon such a small amount of money and such a small share, including the Baroness of Lavoisin and businessmen with complicated backgrounds and relationships.
If she made a little more money, her workshop would be targeted.
By then, it is not certain whether the workshop and technology will still be hers.
Now that her family has gained a little bit of power and it is the critical moment of war, she is a little bolder.
The combined income of several workshops can add up to 20 to 30 gold coins a year, which is pretty good at this stage.
She thought that one should be cautious when making money and spending money, and it would be best to be rich without being known.
For example, the difference between spending more than a hundred gold coins to buy a necklace and spending more than a hundred gold coins to expand a house.
Although both cost so much money, the outside world's acceptance of the two is completely different.
Olivia rode her horse past several workshops. Now Antona has become a workshop owner recognized by the system.
I estimate that old Duke and little Bruce will be able to meet the requirements within this month.
At this moment, Ethan purchased a basket of wool from the surrounding area and sent it to little Bruce's house for processing. It weighed about thirty pounds.
This batch of wool is used to blend with ramie to weave sweat-absorbent and breathable summer fabrics.
Thirty pounds of wool must be mixed with seventy pounds of ramie to make cloth.
The difference in this ratio will increase as the temperature gets hotter, and later on, only a dozen pounds of wool will be needed to match eighty pounds of ramie or flax.
The width of today's looms is about 80 centimeters. One hundred pounds of raw materials can produce about 2,400 to 2,500 yards of cloth.
Before the tools were upgraded, it took the Brussels family two full months of work on an old vertical loom to weave the piece.
But now his family hired four spinners and used the money Olivia provided to buy four foot-operated looms like those used by large weaving workshops on the market, as well as various more sophisticated tools.
Replace all the tools that were previously made by hand.
His family also hired two self-employed farmers who knew how to weave to help.
Now, the time it takes to weave these fabrics has been shortened to about ten days, and we are becoming more and more skilled.
After it is finished, according to the rules of the Lavosen Chamber of Commerce, one must cut one and a half yards of cloth before it can be sold. The Chamber of Commerce refuses rolls of cloth, saying that it is easy to falsely report the size.
According to the output after the equipment upgrade, the little Bruce family can now fully meet the standard of 500 pieces of goods per month.
At this moment, Olivia was riding on a horse and trotting past. She could see Ethan pointing at the loom and saying something in the weaving shed of little Bruce's family.
Perhaps, it is this innate creative talent DNA that has started moving again.
Olivia had clearly observed the upper limit of Ethan's talent.
Ethan's level can be improved to the greatest extent possible based on the original foundation.
But if she wants a revolutionary product to appear, she has to ask the system to grant her a five-star creation.
Olivia rode Lily back to the manor, intending to leave everything to time with the intention of hiding her achievements and fame.
…
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