The next morning I was up and out early, and sitting on Irma's veranda with a lot of different birdies chirping away merrily, I felt so good  that I wanted to join in with a chirp or two! Today I was varnishing the bedroom floor with a waterbased varnish, seeing that it does not have a strong smell, as with the creosote still hanging like a thick smog in the room, I couldn't face any more lung ruining smells! While the first coat was drying I gave a coat also to the scullery floor, and was in ecstacy at how nice it looked. Then The bedroom had it's second coat, and with the tin now almost empty, I gave the scullery a second coat. It was quite hard work yet again, and I took a long sleep on the veranda, we call it a stoep, unconcious of the bally disaster that awaited me in the scullery.  My beautiful floor was now a milky whitish colour, with my paintings just noticable! 'Oh, can one be so unlucky!', I screamed to the heavens, and felt like closing the doors and made a run for my flat, never to come back. Because it was the last varnish in the tin, and me not having stirred it enough when doing the first coats, a residue had formed at the botttom, and the varnish became milky. My floor was ruined, as the paint worked wonderfully with the raw screed, but after trying to fix it for hours, I relised that the effect was lost forever, so I did another three paintings, very halfheartedly, and it was just not nice at all! I changed it later, and instead of the chicken I painted a fish that looked a lot prettier! Luckily the bedroom was ok, as I would just have put a carpet in if my beautiful imitation tiles were also ruined.
I then tackled the bathroom floor, and to camouflage the sickly green bath, or at least make it more inconspicious, I mixed the same green as the bath, and painted small green tiles all along the edges, and then the same colour as the bedroom tiles, but just flat, in the middle. I made VERY sure that I kept on stirring the varnish.
But by the end of two days my lungs were so sore, and I had developed a nasty little cough from the creosote fumes, that I went back to my flat for a rest. I was in quite a hurry to finish, as I had rented out my flat, and had to move my furniture before I left.
So I gave my lungs three days to recover before tackling the main house, painting the walls of all the rooms except the kitchen a lovely light yellow, as I picked up this tin of very expensive paint that was wrongly mixed for next to nothing, thinking that if I did not like it, it won't be to great a loss. It was nice! The previous people left a huge black antique iron bed that was beautiful, but the springs was a bitty soft, and I thought of having it fixed later. But this thing was like HEAVY! I wanted to  paint the floor, as I would have to sleep there, the creosote fumes still making it impossibvle to stay in the new bedroom for longer than five minutes tops!
But I was looking forward to my work, as I enjoyed my sojourn in Scotland tremendously. I had a lot of friends, a small, ancient black Fiat Panda, and once I have packed my tent and other nececities on my days off, I drove all over, and was never disappointed, as I always found a stream with trees around, or I would walk up a mountain and camp there, all on my own, sitting quietly, waiting for whatever wild life would pass. That is something you just can not do in South Africa with it's very high crime rate. The Scots thought me quite mad, but have accepted my madness, that being so natural to me, but to them so very strange!
The bottom picture shows the village children playing in the road.