Chapter 86: House-building Ideas
After menstruation ended, Su Ran officially put building the house on the agenda.
The sausages, seafood, and dried fruit that had been drying before were all dried completely.
Although some had failed to dry and spoiled, most were still successful.
This made Su Ran happily dry the fruit and seafood that beastmen sent later using the same method.
And what made Su Ran happiest was that every flavor of the sausages she made was very successful.
Not only did she like them herself, but the beastmen also liked them very much.
Before putting away these completed food items, she took out nearly half the quantity and sent a share to every beastman family.
Wanting them to learn these food-making methods was one aspect, and on the other hand, it was also a return gift for the condolence gifts the beastmen had sent when she was “sick.”
The remaining dried fruit and air-dried seafood were all collected by Su Ran into jars made of wood and stone.
The sausages were hung by her inside the bird’s nest.
Then a few days later, Su Ran discovered that Gray’s fondness for sausages had surpassed fried meatballs and roast meat.
Because almost every time before a meal, Gray would stick to Su Ran’s ears with a fawning face, clingily nagging a few words like “sausage, Gray wants sausage…”
Then after Su Ran nodded, it would hurriedly run back to the bird’s nest to fetch two sausages and eat them with that day’s main meal.
Even during the daytime when idle, it would sneak one down to eat as a snack.
Then after being caught by Su Ran a few times but seeing that Su Ran wasn’t angry, Gray’s courage gradually grew.
To the point that the quantity of the remaining half of Su Ran’s sausages quickly decreased at a visible speed within a few days.
Then to satisfy Gray’s gluttony, Su Ran had to take out another day to make a batch of sausages for drying before starting to prepare materials for building the house.
Now that food was not lacking, Su Ran did not plan to correct Gray’s greedy eating behavior.
Moreover, Gray now having greedy eating behavior toward favorite food was ultimately because it had never eaten it before, so it especially liked it upon first tasting.
Once it got familiar with this flavor of food, the degree of liking would also decrease accordingly.
Life rarely offers such a liking.
When conditions allowed, Su Ran did not want to restrict Gray from gaining happiness from food.
After all, under current conditions, being able to eat an extremely delicious gourmet food was already very rare.
On the next day after making the sausages, Su Ran began preparing to make the most needed material for covering the house.
She was going to start making stone bricks.
Su Ran wanted the house she built to have a not-small area.
In her vision, the house would be similar to the single-story flat houses in the North.
The interior of the house would be divided into three main parts.
Namely the west room, kitchen, and east room.
After entering the house from the house doorway, it would be the kitchen, with the east and west bedrooms on either side of the kitchen.
And outside this main structure, she also wanted to erect a large sliding door about one point five meters from the entry door to the inside, dividing the house doorway and the formal kitchen into two parts.
This way, there wouldn’t be dust and oil smoke filling the whole room when making fire for cooking.
And the corridor separated out in front of the doorway could also hold some other daily necessities, so they wouldn’t mix with kitchen items and become a mess.
Actually, the function of the wooden door was equivalent to the sliding door installed in kitchens on Earth.
For the bedrooms on both sides, Su Ran planned to build a heated brick bed in each bedroom.
The low temperatures of spring in this world had already been hard for her to endure; she didn’t think she could survive the winter in this world relying on a bed without warmth.
For the position of the heated brick bed, after some hesitation, Su Ran finally decided on a south window north kang layout.
After all, if her technique was immature and the built window leaked air, then sleeping by the leaky window side in winter, she feared she would be blown into hemiplegia in one night.
The layouts in the east and west bedrooms were about the same. The only difference was that the west side bedroom would be slightly smaller.
Because Su Ran wanted to partition off a small storage room behind the west side bedroom.
Besides the main house, Su Ran wanted to build another side room for storing sundries.
But whether to build the side room with stone or, for convenience, with wood, Su Ran hadn’t decided yet.
However, no matter what, since no one would live in the side room, there would be no fire lit.
Then in winter if the weather was extremely cold, some things, like food, would not be suitable to put in the side room.
Because they would freeze and spoil.
So Su Ran wanted to partition out a storage room inside the main house’s room to store valuable things and some food that couldn’t be placed outside, keeping them in this storage room.
This way, in winter, as long as the main house had the kang burning, there was no need to worry about the food inside the room freezing.
With this subdivision, the house Su Ran planned to build would be at least eighty or ninety square meters, requiring even more stone bricks.
Regarding the size of the stone bricks, after some deliberation, Su Ran finally settled on twice the size of normal stone bricks on Earth.
This size could reduce some of the workload of making stone bricks while not being too large to carry when building the house.
And even if it was too heavy to carry, she could ask beastmen for help.
After deciding the size of the stone bricks, Su Ran began making them.
She asked familiar beastmen like Xiao Ju, A Jin, A Huo, and Yao Yao to help.
Of course, helping would have rewards, and Su Ran’s current best rewards were naturally gourmet food made in various ways.
The beastmen quite recognized Su Ran’s skills, so Xiao Ju and the others almost never thought to refuse helping Su Ran.
Before starting to make stone bricks, Su Ran and Gray first flew to the opposite bank of the river and collected a large area of black-flowered Malan grass.
Now it was summer, and the quantity of black-flowered Malan grass was even denser than more than a month ago.
And not only denser, the height of the grass had also grown by half compared to before.
Now it looked to be about half a meter tall.
This also made collecting easier for Su Ran.
The roots of black-flowered Malan grass had no corrosiveness, so to prevent juice from getting on their bodies, when collecting black-flowered Malan grass, Su Ran and Gray dug them out whole from the ground.
They transported the Malan grass back to the opposite bank of the river and directly placed it on the gravel beach that Su Ran had discovered before.
The position of the gravel beach was upstream on the river beach.
Su Ran was a bit worried that Malan grass juice and the corroded stone dregs would be washed downstream by the river water, affecting the beastmen’s daily water use.
So every day when making stone bricks, she would use a withered tree on the river beach, away from the river water and near the woods, to circle out a square enclosure.
Then the corroded stone dregs scraped off each day and the discarded Malan grass leaves were directly thrown into the enclosure.
When production ended in the evening, she would directly cover the wooden encircled area with a layer of branches, light a fire, and burn it.
The reason for doing this was that Su Ran had discovered when previously using black-flowered Malan grass that after intense fire burning, the corrosiveness in the black-flowered Malan grass juice would completely disappear.
She had previously tried burning a lump of stone dregs that had been scraped off rocks and corroded soft. After burning, the soft stone dregs turned directly into a pile of fine powder that crumbled at a pinch.
And after that, when placing animal hide on the burned stone dregs and rubbing however, the surface of the animal hide showed no change.
So Su Ran decided to directly use this method to dispose of the corrosive stone garbage to be thrown away, to avoid possible harm.
Regarding the room layout, I posted a picture in the comment section, everyone can go take a look (it’s just a novel, don’t nitpick realism oh~)
