After some haggling, the house was finally sold for 1.88 million. See, both the buyer and seller got a rather auspicious number.
After buying the house, the next step was to handle the household registration. This was done by my father, who naturally spent money and gave gifts to transfer the household registration of all nine members of the Tao family to the old house in Xihe Village.
The courtyard house was also listed for 30 million yuan (3,000 yuan for a second set of currency). Although it was a house in the town, it was a three-section courtyard house. The price of 30 million yuan was not cheap, but it was not expensive either.
Selling a house isn't something that can be done in just a few days. Anyway, just put the house on the market first, and if there's a suitable price, sell it; if not, just keep it for now.
It's the busy farming season now. After the wheat harvest, we'll start making arrangements for house repairs.
Grandpa, Grandma, Third Sister, and even the brothers after school would take little Ajiu back to the old house to clean whenever they had free time.
The yard was full of weeds and dilapidated things, all of which needed to be cleared away in advance.
Otherwise, if the repairmen come and you still can't get into your house, wouldn't that be a waste of time?
It was hot, but compared to the temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius in later generations, this temperature of around 30 degrees was still bearable.
"Oh, Grandma, there's a well in this yard, but no one has used it for so many years. It probably needs to be cleaned. Look at all the filth in it, no wonder no one comes here to fetch water!"
There is water in the well; it appears to be three or four meters below. However, there is too much dirt and it needs to be cleaned.
They took all the harvested weeds home to feed their sheep, not wasting a single bit.
If it weren't so far, the brothers would have liked to bring their chickens, ducks, and geese over to eat grass seeds.
The original owner had also planted fruit trees in front of the house, but unfortunately, they were neglected for many years and died from insect infestation. So, Grandpa dug up the trees and chopped up all the rotten wood in the house, piling it up in the backyard so that it could be used as firewood when people came to live there in the future.
After cutting the grass, they set a fire on the ground to thoroughly clean up the remaining dry, yellow grass on the surface.
It took them a week to clean the old house inside and out.
When the weekend came, Father led his brothers to clean the well again.
The so-called cleaning involves first taking out the dirty things, then pouring the sewage on the ground, and spreading a layer of white lime inside and outside the house. The lime can be disinfected when it comes into contact with water.
The rate at which the well was leaking water couldn't keep up with the rate at which they were pouring it out. Finally, they scraped away the silt, moss, and other messy things inside the well, and the well was finally cleaned up.
The old house is cool in the summer, and my grandparents don't want to miss the good time to grow vegetables, so they want to repair the house as soon as possible.
So they asked the village chief to find a group of young people and pay them 10,000 yuan a day to help repair the house.
The necessary materials, such as tiles, beams, and adobe bricks, can be prepared well in advance, taking advantage of the current weather.
Because of this, Grandpa hired an oxcart to pick him up early every morning and take him home in the evening. The round trip cost 600 yuan.
The young people in the village come here to work after they finish their own farm work, and they work until dark. However, those who don't work a full day are paid by the hour, at two thousand yuan per hour.
Summer days are long, and even after work, you can still get a lot done each day, making quite a few adobe bricks.
Grandma took her to stay at Grandma Zhou's house temporarily, where she helped Grandpa cook a meal and did some light chores.
The farm work in town was left to my third sister and a few brothers. Sometimes my father would come home early and also go to work in the fields.
I was thinking I could move into the new house after the wheat harvest, but I didn't expect the old house to be repaired before the wheat harvest was even over.
The total cost of building materials, labor, walls, gates, and doors was only around 500,000 yuan.
It's really cheap, mainly because the adobe bricks are free, and the wood isn't any good either, so it's not expensive.
As for labor, it's not like we're building a house, so there's not much work to do. People come to work in their spare time every day, earning 2,000 yuan per hour, which is considered to have minimized the cost.
Considering that there are many girls in the family, they built their wall to be two meters high and then added a layer of broken tiles on top.
In those days, there were few people, and the houses of neighbors were not close together; there was a road in between them, so the village could be considered well-connected.
Grandma is someone who never wastes a single bit of land. She planted loofah, string beans, winter melon, and pumpkin in the corner of the wall. Because she planted them a little late, she didn't know if they would survive, but she felt it was better than leaving them empty.
Grandma planted many roses and other flowering plants in front of the courtyard gate, hoping to one day welcome them home with a whole flower wall.
There's only a meter-wide space in front of the door. After planting flowers, Grandma also planted chives, surrounded them with scallions, and scattered some bok choy.
The seasonal vegetables in the yard, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, eggplants, and peppers, were replanted.
A toilet was specially built in the backyard, along with sheep pens, chicken coops, and rabbit burrows.
There's a road behind the yard, and Grandma even planted sweet potatoes there; she really didn't waste a single inch of space.
Grandma planted walnut and persimmon trees in the yard so that there would be a cool place to rest in the summer.
When the old house is sold in the future, we can transplant the grapevines back, and then this home will be even more perfect.
The reason why Xihe Village has a small population is that, in addition to being far from the town, the mountain roads are rugged and difficult to travel, and rainwater from the mountains floods into the village every rainy season.
Some people even felt the village was unsafe and moved to live on the hillside.
Xihe Village is separated from other villages by a river. Due to its special geographical location and the geological disasters that occurred in the past, fewer people have married into the village.
Coincidentally, their house was located on higher ground, and after the eldest sister came to see the location, she tried hard to recall the dream, and it seemed that nothing had happened here before she passed away.
With this information, that's enough. How long can they live in this old house? If it becomes really dangerous in the future, they can move to the hillside and rebuild their house. For now, they can just make do with what they have.
Grandma Wang, our neighbor, is a nice person. After the wheat harvest season started, the Tao family got busy and sent her a jar of wine, asking them to water their vegetables and plants so they wouldn't die of drought. You know, in the summer, if you don't water them for even a day, the newly planted vegetables could scorch. So, this jar of wine was a worthwhile gift.
They not only gave them wine, but also the key to their yard so that they could easily come and go and use the well water in the yard.
When it was time to harvest wheat, the older brothers were all given a break. Xiao Jiu stayed home and took on the responsibility of preparing the fire, cooking, and making mung bean soup to help everyone cool off in the summer heat.
Grandma would come back to cook right on time. At most, she could cook some corn grits, steam some buns, and make a cold dish. When there were many people, cooking rice, making pancakes, and steaming buns and rolls were beyond her capabilities.
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