The loft in tricked-out pictures

I've been playing with Adobe Photoshop. More than I usually do, I mean. Normally I just crop, brighten, contrast, and sharpen my pictures. That's to compensate for the limitations of the camera, and the limitations of the photographer. It's not cheating. It's just make the best of a good thing.

This effect turns your photo into
something that looks like a drawing.

This time, I used different Photoshop effects to highlight the best aspects of the work we are doing up in "the loft" — the attic, the upstairs, the new space. It's a good rainy-day activity. The weather outside is chilly and damp, so you have to entertain yourself as best you can.

I imagine the space in the dormer window
filled with green potted plants this winter.

We've nearly finished applying primer — la sous-couche, or "the under-layer" — to the walls upstairs. Now we have to decide whether to put on one more coat of it before we put on the final coat (or coats) of paint.

The movable scaffold that our contractor loaned us for the
summer has been a big help in getting the job done.

Sous-couche costs less than paint, and the more primer we put on the walls, the less paint we'll need, in theory. It's just a matter of economy. The primer gives us a good white base to paint on. We are hoping one coat of paint will do the job. Since both the primer and the paint are white, we now have a good idea what the finished room will look like.

Coco obviously did a nice job designing and building the walls.

The goal is to get the painting done as soon as possible so that we can move our furniture upstairs. We also need to get the radiators put back up on their wall brackets and hooked up so that we'll have heat up there when we need it. This past weekend was a reminder than summer doesn't necessarily last very long here in Saint-Aignan. The high temperature on Sunday barely hit 65ºF.

On the evening news, reporters were saying that the weather all over France was more like what we'd expect at the end of October rather than the middle of August. Luckily, warmer weather is predicted to return by the end of this week. Our tomatoes need some more sun — or we'll be making a lot of fried green tomatoes or green-tomato jelly this year.