frightfiction Chapter 323 The Importance of Foundation
Chapter 323 The Importance of Foundation
Shen Zhiqiu nodded: "Well, I asked Duke Fu, we can go together then. How is the progress on the west side of the river today?"
Father Shen replied: "The foundation is almost done. We can build the house tomorrow. The women will start weaving straw mats later."
Today's thatched houses are built by building the four walls and constructing the triangular beams, and then putting the woven straw mats on top one by one. If you want to be more rain and windproof, you can weave it denser.
Gao Shuangxi followed up with a report: "We have made more than 20 sets of tools for building old earth houses, plus there are several old sets in Tangjia Village.
The main reason is that no one in their village has built old mud houses in recent years. They are all built with bricks and tiles, and some tools are not kept."
Shen Zhiqiu nodded to show his understanding: "Then is there enough wood left? I plan to put a layer of wood planks inside our house beams. You guys can keep an eye on it. If it's not enough, go up the mountain and cut wood as soon as possible, and then exchange it with the village."
Shen Zhibei quickly replied, "We have plenty of wood. Li Zheng Tang also said that if there are not enough planks, just go to the village and get some."
Why wasn't my eldest brother-in-law the one who replied? It's because my eldest brother-in-law is so exhausted. He has been very busy recently. He can't sleep for long. He works as soon as he opens his eyes. He uses all kinds of tools.
He was in charge of all the carpentry-related work. Although he had the help of carpenters from Tangjia Village, the autumn harvest was coming soon.
Previously, Shen Zhiqiu had drawn a blueprint of a thresher and asked him to study it, saying that at least four or five machines would be sufficient.
The fellow villagers in Tangjia Village helped them so much, and they were not the kind of people who just wanted to take advantage without giving anything in return. Naturally, they wanted to give something in return.
Plus, they're going to build a house soon, and it won't take long to build a house with so many people.
You have to make tables, benches, cabinets and so on. Even those are not urgent, windows, doors and so on are all work.
So he doesn't care about the wood or anything like that. It's all handled by Gao Shuangxi and his logging team. Gao Shuangxi checks every day and immediately finds a way to fill the gap if there's a shortage.
Shen Zhiqiu continued to make arrangements: "We have to make some adobe bricks. It's cold in the north. When the house is built, I plan to build a kang in the house and a fire wall."
That's why the foundation he left was larger than the current house. He thought that since he couldn't enjoy the floor heating, at least he could build a fire wall next to the kang.
When the time comes, it will be connected to the kang, and the smoke will circulate in the fire wall when the kang is burned.
The whole room is warm in winter.
This job will probably be left to women. Men build the house first, and women can hold up half the sky at the critical moment. They are the ones who have to make adobe bricks and weave straw mats.
And because they are needed urgently, they cannot be left to dry, so the finished adobe bricks must be dried by baking.
It's not that the people of Tangjia Village didn't want to lend them the adobe bricks, but that they didn't have many adobe bricks in stock, and they really weren't enough for them to use.
I still have to do part of it myself first. If it doesn't work, I can borrow some from Tangjiacun if I don't have enough.
After discussing things, they took a shower and went to bed. There were still many things waiting for them tomorrow, and because they had to go to the provincial capital in five days, Shen Zhiqiu planned to build all the houses in the next four days.
In fact, don’t think this is a fantasy. How can it be possible to build a house in such a short time?
You have to know that there are a lot of people helping, several thousand people, so it is very simple to build a hundred or so houses.
The next day, after seeing off Shen Youyou and her group of eleven people who were setting up the stall, the others also started a new busy day.
Although Shen Zhiqiu and his team did not use blue bricks when building the rammed earth house, they chose larger stones picked up from the foot of Fangshan Mountain or the bank of Xiaoqing River for the bottom layer of the foundation.
Place the stone with the large surface facing downward, flat and stable before grouting.
The mud he poured in was also a mixture of wood ash, clay, and sand.
The base is built with stones instead of bricks. In the process of building, large, medium and small stones should be matched with each other and kept as flat as possible.
Then use Shen Zhiqiu’s simple version of lime mud to fill the gaps between the stones.
This is the bottom foundation. As for the base surface, he used stones and a simple lime grouting method that he developed himself.
After trimming the edges and corners, the ground is basically parallel, which also makes it easier to set up the rammed earth wall formwork.
In fact, rammed earth, as a material for ancient buildings, is a solid, dense, and crevices-free compressed mixed mud block.
Traditional rammed earth walls, with the unique colors of raw earth from different places, form a unique rammed earth texture during the manual tamping process.
Shen Zhiqiu's method of building old earth houses is also the method commonly used in the 1960s and 1970s, because nowadays, adobe is used instead of stone for the foundation of rammed earth houses.
On the first day of official construction, the strong laborers laid all the foundations with stone and leveled the surface, but it would take time for it to dry.
So they chose to light a fire on the newly built foundation surface, trying to use fire to make them dry faster.
As for the women, except for some old ladies who cook and the girls who make jelly and steamed cake, the rest are almost all weaving straw mats and making adobe bricks on the west side of the river.
Everyone is familiar with adobe. Just put the mud into a wooden frame, compact it, and then remove it from the mold.
As for the straw mat used for the roof, it is different from the straw mat used on the bed or kang. It requires two long bamboo boards to clamp a thick and dense layer of thatch at the root end, and then tie it up with straw ropes.
The straw mat was about a step and a half long, and Shen Zhiqiu required it to be at least three inches thick to keep warm.
To be honest, no one has an easy time, including the old lady who cooks. This is food for thousands of people. The boys went out early in the morning, carrying bamboo baskets with dry food for lunch and pushing carts.
Because this is their last day to go up the mountain to look for magical herbs, wild vegetables and bamboo shoots. After today, when the ground is dry,
They also had to help dig and transport soil, after all, they wanted to move into the house as soon as possible.
As for Shen Youyou and his companions who had come to the city to set up stalls, after setting up their stalls today, they went shopping with a lot of money in their pockets.
The first stop was to buy cloth. This was everyone's unanimous decision. Five days later, they would build a tomb for their grandfather. They could not wear shabby clothes, with patches all over their clothes, or shoes with toes showing.
So they had to buy cloth, even coarse linen would be fine, and they had to wear clean clothes so that they could go to worship the benefactor of their entire village neatly.
Shen Youyou asked Zhou Qian and found a cloth shop that was not far from the market and had very affordable prices.
As soon as you enter the door, you will see a busy scene. Customers coming in and out are all buying cloth, which shows that the business is really good.
The waiter in the shop was also very busy, constantly introducing fabrics to customers and also taking care of the bills.
Because the shopkeeper was simply too busy to handle everything, the people he served were all peddlers who walked the streets and planned to do wholesale.
Shen Youyou and his friends must have bought a lot, so they looked at the situation and went straight to the shopkeeper. However, they had only taken two steps when they were stopped by a waiter, who said:
"Young guest, would you like to see some cloth? Can I introduce some to you?"
Obviously, he didn't think that this little customer could buy a lot, and didn't want to bother the shopkeeper. Besides, the wholesale price is different from the retail price.
It is natural for retail customers to hear the wholesale price, but it is inevitable that some petty customers will feel uncomfortable and think they have paid too high.