A few pieces of concrete floor for testing were all dry.

Xie Mulin inspected the past piece by piece and found that most of the effects were okay, the best two were lime slag cement and brick and tile powder cement. However, it may be because when making cement samples before, the technology was relatively rough, and the grinding powder was not fine enough, so the cement floor was not smooth enough after solidification, and it did not seem to be very hard. As for the cement floor in Xie Mulin's memory, there are still many gaps.

But in this day and age, it is enough to use it.

Ma Luyao liked these concrete floors very much, and said to Xie Mulin: "Broken bricks and tiles, slag, and cinders are all very easy to obtain, and lime gypsum is not a rare thing. In this way, the ground of the old house can be paved in just a few days, and the road in front of the house can be repaired, and a new pier will be built, even if the old lady will live here for a few years. ”

Xie Mulin originally had this idea, nodded and said: "Then collect the materials as soon as possible, but our family has too few manpower and insufficient tools, and it is too laborious to make the materials into cement powder by hand, do you need to hire more people?" Or find some tools that you need to use? Also, I found that the burned cement will have a better effect, all of which are heated in an iron pot, which is too inefficient, and I am afraid that it is better to get a kiln to burn. ”

Ma Lu Yao said: "There is a shortage of manpower, you can pick people from the tenants, and there are also people on the side of the new house, please ask my wife to transfer a group of people over." The old house is secluded, and there are a few more young people guarding here, and the old lady and the girls and mothers at home live at ease. The cement that the second girl took out is a good thing, and it is best not to pass on the recipe to outsiders. The second girl has a noble status, and she has been studying since she was a child, so she may not take this recipe to heart. But good things can be passed down from family to family! If you can build a cement kiln at home and make more cement powder to sell, you can add a lot of money to your family just from this lake! The family's situation is not as good as before, and it hurts its vitality, so it is time to find some way to make money. It is inconvenient for the wife, the young master and the girl to come forward, so send a letter to Jingli, and the shopkeeper Mao will send someone to take care of it. ”

Xie Mulin glanced at Ma Luyao with some surprise, on weekdays, she only knew that her mother's companion was loyal and reliable, and she was very neat, but she didn't expect that he was quite financially aware.

Doing a cement workshop business is indeed a way to make money. But Xie Mulin was not sure whether the Xie family's third room needed to control this financial road. There are too few adult males in their family, and they mainly take the route of studying and becoming a scholar, and they have no manpower to take care of the cement business. Even the treasurers and stewards under their hands already have their own functions, and they may not be able to be distracted. However, there are a lot of people in the Xie clan, and it is still possible to pick one of them out as an agent. Anyway, with Xie Pu's official position and the style that the clan has always had, no one from the Xie clan would swallow Xie Pu's property with malicious intentions.

Xie Mulin didn't really care how much income the cement business could bring to the Xie family, as long as she could use the building material in large quantities as she wanted. If you can form a closer relationship with the people in the clan through the cement formula, it will be more meaningful for the Wen mother and son and others who have just returned to the clan land.

Xie Mulin didn't say much, she just instructed Ma Luyao: "Find a place nearby where you can build a kiln as soon as possible, let's burn a batch of cement to repair the old house first, and also take the opportunity to adjust the two cement formulas to the best plan." When the time comes, with the old house as an example, my mother can see the benefits of cement at a glance, and she will naturally know what to do. ”

Ma Lu Yao answered, and an old servant who had been silent next to him suddenly spoke: "There is a brick kiln nearby, but it has been abandoned for many years, and I don't know if it can still be used." But that kiln belongs to our family, so there is no need to alarm outsiders. ”

Ma Lu Yao looked back and recognized that it was the old servant of the Xie family's third room, who had been a small servant beside the old lady Xie Zehu in the past, but he was just taciturn, and he was not clever, he only had a dead strength, so he was not very important. He asked the old servant, "Where is the brick kiln?" Why haven't I heard of it? ”

The old servant grinned: "Of course Steward Ma doesn't know, that's when the old lady split up and built this mansion." The market of bricks, tiles, wood and stone was very good that year, but the old lady was anxious to build a house in order to marry, so in order to save money, he specially dug a kiln in the back mountain, hired a brick-burning craftsman to come back, and burned bricks to build a house by himself. The kiln was pointed out, and the bricks were very strong. The people in the clan looked good, and after our house was built, two more families bought bricks from the old lady.

However, the old lady thought that the income from burning bricks was too small, so she left home to do business after getting married. After the brick kiln burned the bricks that the two houses wanted, there was no business, so it was sealed, and the craftsmen went to work on other errands. But everyone in the clan knows about it. That day, when I heard that the Xie family moved to Xie Jiajiao and dug a kiln to burn bricks nearby in order to build a house, I knew that they were learning from our old lady! ”

Xie Mulin saw the old servant's proud expression, so he smiled and said, "Then please ask Grandpa to lead the way and lead Uncle Ma to the location of the brick kiln to have a look?" After the flood eight years ago, I don't know if the brick kiln can still be used now. If it still works, it saves a lot of effort. Let's burn the cement nearby, and we will soon be able to repair the old house, and the big guys will not feel shabby to live in. ”

The old servant agreed, and said: "The second girl's recipe is good, if our family knew how to match this cement back then, after the flood, maybe the whole family would not have to relocate." It's a pity to throw away this piece of land so big! ”

Xie Mulin remembered that on the day he swept the tomb of the old lady Xie Zehu, he was chatting with the clan elders who came to watch the ceremony, and he didn't regard the old place of Xie Jiawan as an abandoned land at all, and he clearly had the idea of reusing it sooner or later.

The reason why they moved away in the first place was that after the flood, the land in the vicinity was difficult to cultivate, the houses were seriously damaged, and it was difficult for people to live in. The second reason is that the houses of the Xie family are usually too close to the riverbank, and the terrain here is too low, so there may be another big flood at any time, which will make the clansmen suffer again. As long as the embankments on both sides of the river bank are built, then the dwellings that are rebuilt a little further away from the river may not be inhabitable. Eight years later, the nearby farmland has long been replanted and is no longer wasteland.

Xie Jiajiao is not a big place, and even if you develop in the direction of mountains and forests, cut down plants, and clean up soil and rocks, the space that can be opened up is limited. When the Xie clan multiplies to the point where Xie Jiajiao can't accommodate it, someone will definitely move back to this old clan land. In addition, there is the ancestral tomb of the Xie family near here, how can it be easily abandoned? The government allocated new land to the Xie clan, but the clan never handed over the deed of the old land.

Xie Mulin assigned tasks to Ma Luyao and the old servant and sent them away. She looked back at the concrete floors in the yard, and her heart was hot.

The old house is still dilapidated, and the living conditions are far less comfortable than the new one. But the old mansion now has a different meaning to Shermulin.