Chapter 17 - 017 The Layout of the Xie Family Courtyard
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Xie Jingchen took Zhang Shanni away from the kitchen. Before leaving, he heard his mother and father teasing him. He glanced at the little girl who was still looking down, her small face still shining black. He wondered if she had heard them!
Tiesheng's house has a large courtyard. Zhang Shanni followed Xie Jingchen and roughly scanned the area using her spiritual power. She realized that the place enclosed by stone walls alone was more than two acres, and since it was close to the base of the mountain, there really were no other houses around.
As for choosing to settle at the base of the mountain, it was the foresight of the ancestors. If the Xie Family had not been situated at the very foot of the mountain, it's unlikely that all the children would have survived as well as they had.
With no other households nearby and the surrounding areas being wild mountains, Tiesheng, who was the village accountant, really didn't have to worry about how much of the wildland he enclosed. After all, with many sons to accommodate, even over two acres of land felt cramped once divided.
The front courtyard consisted of three rooms, built when Tiesheng first got married. Later, as the children grew up and Xie Jingchen became capable, Tiesheng also took the initiative. When his eldest son, Xie Jingwei, started a family, he built another row of three rooms on the vacant land near the road. These rooms were suite-style, approximately thirty to forty square meters each, divided at his own discretion.
By the time his fourth son, Xie Jinggang, nicknamed Xiong Dan, was to marry, the house was unconsciously short of space again. Consequently, three more suites were added on the mountain side. To differentiate, the first-built three rooms were called the Right Wing Courtyard, and the later built three were called the left wing.
Originally, Xie Jingchen was supposed to be assigned the second room in the Right Wing Courtyard, but since he was in the military and unmarried, he let the room to his older brother. By the time his younger brother got married, the rooms there were just filled.
Xie Jingchen rarely returned home to stay, and since there was no room for him, and although Xie Jingqing had married off, Xie Jingzi was still only in her teens and would need the room for many more years. At that point, Xie Jingchen decided to build a house. Since he paid for the construction entirely out of his own pocket, using a substantial amount of silver, and even produced the architectural plans, the left wing ultimately belonged to Xie Jingchen.