Cave Refuge

Hearing Evan mention that he sells coal, Dong Tianyu quickly asked, "You sell coal?"

Seeing the surprised look on Dong Tianyu's face, Evan felt nothing strange. Basically, all the survivors who had just settled here would be shocked when they heard about selling coal.

"I have not only coal but also washed anthracite, and the price is not high."

Before Dong Tianyu could ask any further, Evan took the initiative to explain, "The Officials' exploration teams discovered an open-pit coal mine not far from our base. Since the coal mine is not far from the sea, the collected coal is directly washed with seawater."

Therefore, our base not only has a stable supply of anthracite, but also the price of the anthracite is not high." After Evan's explanation, the Thompson Family finally understood the source of Evan's coal sales.

Knowing the source of Evan's coal sales, Dong Tianyu finally steered the conversation toward housing renovation: "Since you're in the renovation business, you should be able to get glass windows, right?"

"Of course, and not only can I get glass windows, but I can also customize the color of the glass and the texture of the glass according to your choice."

In this period, compared to before the Natural Disaster, glass is actually a material that is relatively easier to obtain, as everyone knows, the raw material of glass is quartz sand, which is essentially sand. The Magic Capital Base is built by the seaside, so naturally there is no shortage of sand.

Because manufacturing glass requires high temperatures to melt, most glass factories, once their machinery starts running and begins the glass-making process, need to operate round the clock, 24 hours a day to maintain the highest profits.

After all, to increase the temperature of the glass furnaces, every heating up or cooling down process takes a long time, so before the Natural Disaster, most of the furnaces in glass factories operated on a model of changing workers without stopping the furnace.

But now, with the Awakening Skills of the Awakeners, manufacturing glass no longer requires the huge effort of building high-temperature furnaces like before the Natural Disaster.

To make glass now, all one needs is a mold that can withstand high temperatures. Then, put the raw materials inside, use a high-temperature Fire System Skill, and the raw materials inside the mold can be instantly melted into a glass solution.

Then, just pour that glass solution into the desired glass molds before it cools and solidifies, and you can quickly produce glass that meets your expectations.

This method of glass manufacturing using Awakener's abilities results in far less output compared to glass factories before the Natural Disaster, but if glass is produced in small quantities like now, the cost-effectiveness is definitely higher on the Awakener's side.

For this reason, glass is not a rare item now, and the main reason new houses don't have windows installed is not due to a lack of glass, but a lack of window frames.

Currently, there are only two materials available for making window frames: metal and wood. Metal is needless to say, as before the Natural Disaster most windows primarily used metal frames.

Wooden window frames are usually only seen in very old houses from many years ago. Although this type of frame is cheaper, it does not have high durability and can easily suffer natural damage within a few years, for a simple reason that aligns with the old saying: "Dry for a hundred years, wet for a thousand years, but neither dry nor wet lasts but half a year."

If it's a ground floor or a first-floor window using a wooden frame, there really isn't a problem - even if the frame gets damaged or falls off, it doesn't pose a great danger. However, if high-rise windows used wooden frames, once the frame becomes loose and falls off, hitting someone could cause very serious injuries.

Therefore, wooden frames were quickly phased out. And manufacturing plastic frames is currently out of the question because the raw materials are difficult to obtain.

Because of this, it would be more accurate to say that the other party offered the Thompson Family a choice between two different types of window frames, but in reality, the only viable option for the material of the window frames was metal.

Upon realizing this point, Dong Tianyu no longer focused on this issue, and instead asked Evan curiously, "Can you briefly describe what kind of results this house can achieve after renovation?"

Hearing Dong Tianyu's question, Evan knew there was a high probability of securing this job, for unless the Thompson Family chose not to hire outsiders for the decoration, there was practically no one but him available to do the job nearby.

"Nowadays, it's nearly impossible to renovate a house to the pre-Natural Disaster living conditions, so at this time, renovations mainly focus on two aspects: comfort and practicality.

Firstly, regarding comfort, because the house is not connected to municipal water supply, it's necessary to construct a water storage tank within the house. To facilitate the cleaning of the water storage tank, its drainage should be connected to the sewage system.

For this reason, a relatively larger water storage tank is typically constructed in the kitchen, making it easy to use water when cooking with fire. However, a smaller water storage tank is also built in each bathroom for convenience when bathing, mopping the floor, or cleaning the bathroom.

Actually, since your residence is on the top floor, you could also build a water tower on the rooftop. With a water tower in place, the house could have running water like before the Natural Disaster, eliminating the need to construct an indoor water storage tank.

However, building a water tower at the top of the building now would mean using metal pipes instead of plastic ones, and the cost of using metal pipes is not low. Therefore, under normal circumstances, very few people choose to construct a water tower."

After completing his explanation, Evan particularly observed the expressions of the three members of the Thompson Family. Upon confirming that they were not interested in the water tower he mentioned, he continued introducing other aspects of the renovation:

"Besides water usage, the most important factors are cooking with fire and heating. To put it more bluntly, it's about the use and storage of fuel.

At least one of you three should have Storage Equipment, but regardless of whether it's for cooking with fire or heating when the weather turns cold, a considerable amount of fuel will be used.

Although your family owns Storage Equipment, it's improbable to allow bulky fuel to occupy the precious Storage Space for long periods, so the house will definitely need a separate room to store combustibles.

Aside from a room for storing combustibles, depending on the type of fuel you will use long term, the kitchen needs to be built with a stove that suits your fuel choice. If you opt for wood, since it requires adding fuel from the bottom, the constructed stove will be larger.

If coal is used as fuel, however, constructing a few small stoves will suffice, as one can directly toss the coal into the stove from above.

In the kitchen, aside from using different types of fuel to build different styles of stoves, other aspects are mostly the same. Apart from style and appearance differences, there's not much else that varies significantly.

Moving on to the heating aspect, since there is no air conditioning, although it's uncertain what the cooling situation will be like in the future, if we go by the regular standards of a Cave, to maintain indoor temperature, one can simply build a fireplace in the living room.

Even if the outdoor temperature is very low in winter, with a fireplace inside, the room temperature should be able to stay above ten degrees Celsius. Moreover, if you don't mind, the fireplace can be modified to create heated walls indoors. Although it may reduce some indoor space, with heated walls, even if the outdoor temperature is freezing, you won't feel cold indoors bare-chested."

From Evan's detailed and earnest introduction, Dong Tianyu identified various issues with the house, yet these problems reminded Dong Tianyu of the days when he lived in a bungalow as a child.