I had decided to colourwash the walls lightly to hide all the bad places, as it is a wonderful camouflage for walls that were fixed by the likes of self! Definitely no expert! It looked really good, and I had just finished with that when Jan returned from Johannesburg, and he could take the baby for a while so that I could repaint the floors, as I did not like to expose his little lungs to any fumes, although as I used a waterbased paint and varnish, it wasn't too bad.
My room looked stunning, and I was very pleased with it, but what I appreciated most was the fact that I did not have to sprint down to the bathroom in the freezing cold.
I couldn't decide what to do with the steps going down to the bathroom. The two top ones were just cement, while the bottom ones were bricks, and I hovered between just varnishing it, or tile it, maybe doing some mosaic.
As my house was known to the locals as the Snake house, they believing that a big snake lived in my roof, I decided on a bit of fun, and painted a snake crawling up the stairs, so that if someone try to burgle me, they would think it was a real snake, and take off without taking my stuff. That was just for the interim, while I try to decide what to do.It was such a good thing that someone had started the rumour about the snake, as my house stood alone for six to eight months every year, and nobody had ever touched it.Yet.
As there were lots of burglaries around, I was actually extremely fortunate.
We have this druglord called Zjivago living in Haarlem, and he gets the kids onto drugs, and then sends them out to burgle houses in order to obtain drugs. The most horrid stories went around about this man, and I was sure he was behind all the nonsense, as he was in jail for about five years, and the drug problem was a lot better, and there was also a lot less burglaries.Now that he is free again, there is a lot of problems, and a story went around that a house that burned down killing parents and two kids, was him taking revenge
But our policemen were so corrupt, and the people tell me that they have seen the police bringing alcohol to the shebeens on Sundays when they had run out. Shebeens are illegal drinking houses, usually in somebody's house, and according to Charmaine, there was about twenty one shebeens in the little village with not more than maybe  two and a half thousand people.