Your local painter and decorator in Camborne

Most of our year is spent within a few miles of Camborne. We can come and look at a job without a long wait, come back to check a colour on the wall before you commit, and if the weather closes in halfway through an exterior we can be back the first dry morning rather than a fortnight later.

It also means we know what to expect before we knock on the door. A two-up two-down in one of the old terraces, a rendered semi on the estates towards Roskear, a flat over a shop near the town centre: each has its own habits.

Camborne grew fast when the mines were at full stretch, and the town still wears it. Long runs of terraced cottages built for mining families, granite or killas rubble under render or pointing, with small front rooms, steep stairs and solid walls that hold damp if they are sealed with the wrong paint. Inside, the plaster is often lime on the original walls and gypsum on later patches, so it takes filler and paint differently from one wall to the next.

The later Victorian and Edwardian terraces, and the bigger houses that came with the School of Mines and the town's engineering firms, bring bay windows, timber sashes, deep skirtings and picture rails. Woodwork is where the labour goes on these: sanding back years of gloss, filling old timber and getting a clean line where the glazing bar meets the glass.

Around the edges of the old town the housing is later: council-built semis and short terraces from between the wars and after, private estates from the seventies onward, and newer housing on the eastern side towards Tuckingmill and the retail area around Tesco. These are quicker to decorate but not trouble-free: cement render cracks, uPVC-era fascias hide rotten timber behind them, and a lot of the semis have never had their pebbledash properly stabilised before it was painted.

People often ask who paints render, and whether it is a builder's job or a decorator's. It is ours. Exterior painting in this town is mostly render and masonry work: washing off the green, cutting out and filling cracks, stabilising anything chalky, then two coats of a breathable masonry paint on the solid-walled cottages and a suitable coating on the cement-rendered later houses. Timber windows, doors, fascias and garage doors get done at the same visit.

Camborne sits a couple of miles inland from the north coast, high enough to catch every south-westerly. It is not salt spray in the way Portreath or Hayle get it, but it is a lot of driving rain and long damp spells, and the west- and south-facing gables take the worst of it. That is where the old coating fails first, and where the preparation has to be most thorough.

The best time of year for exterior work here is late spring through early autumn, when the walls have had a chance to dry out and there are enough dry days in a row for the coats to cure. We would rather give you a realistic date than promise a March start the weather will not allow.

Camborne has a lot of rented property, from single terraced houses let by local landlords to flats above the shops on the main street and estate houses managed by agents. Much of the decorating in Camborne is redecoration between tenancies: a full re-emulsion in a neutral colour, woodwork touched up or repainted, ceilings sorted where a leak has stained them, and the place ready for photographs and viewings without dragging on for weeks.

Where the property is still occupied we work around the tenant rather than the other way round. Agreeing days in advance, keeping to the rooms we said we would be in, leaving it tidy at the end of the day and being straightforward about what is finished and what is not. One of the reviews on our Google profile is from a landlord whose estate we worked across over a period of months, and the tenant liaison was as much a part of that as the painting.

Homeowners who have just bought one of the older houses tend to come to us with the opposite problem: everything at once. Stripping woodchip and layers of old paper, dealing with the ceilings, sorting the woodwork and then colour. We will happily do it room by room over a longer period if that suits you better than one big job.

We come and look. Inside, we want to see the state of the walls and woodwork, how much furniture there is to move and whether there is any paper to strip, because those are what set the price, not the size of the room on its own. Outside, we walk round the whole house, check the render by hand, look at the condition of the timber and note where access is awkward.

Many of the terraces have no off-street parking and the roads are narrow, so on an exterior we plan where the tower or ladders will stand and talk to you about the pavement side before we start.

The quote then sets out what is included, what preparation we have allowed for and how many coats. If something changes once the old paint is off, you hear about it before we carry on, not on the final bill.