Painter and decorator in Carbis Bay, for houses whose owners are often away

A lot of the houses in Carbis Bay are owned by people who are not in them most of the year. Some are let by the week through the season, some are second homes used for a fortnight in August and the odd weekend, and either way the owner is likely to be reading this a long way from TR26. So the first job is not the painting. It is agreeing how a job gets arranged and checked when nobody is standing in the drive watching it.

It works like this. We look at the house on a date that suits the keyholder, housekeeper or agent, and send you a quote that sets out what it covers. Dates come from the booking calendar: an exterior into an empty week or a run of them, an interior into the gap between the last guests of the autumn and the first of the spring. We collect keys and alarm codes from whoever holds them, sort out water and power on the first morning, and send photographs as each elevation or room is finished, with a note of anything we found that was not on the list. Nothing off the list is done without asking, and the house is left ready for the cleaner.

Carbis Bay's houses are built for the view. On the slopes between the village on the main road and the beach are big detached houses and bungalows, a good number of them rebuilt or extended, with white render, sea-facing balconies and whole walls of glazing on the bay side. White shows every streak of green and every rust mark under a fixing, a balcony puts a rendered upstand and a painted rail straight into the weather, and all that glass leaves narrow render margins and long runs of frame and sill to cut in against.

Salt comes off the bay on any onshore wind, and what it does to render and timber is covered on our St Ives and Portreath pages. The short version is that the seaward side is washed down more than once, left to dry, and given two full coats of a proper masonry paint. Balcony floors and upstands are checked for standing water and failed sealant first, because paint over a leak is wasted, and a steel rail is taken back to bright metal and rust-primed before its finish goes on.

Then there is the slope. A bay-side elevation that is one storey at the road can be three at the garden, so some walls are reached from a tower on the terrace and some need scaffold, and the quote says which. Exterior work belongs in the settled months from late spring to early autumn, which on a let means an empty week or two, so book it early.

Inside, the scale is what sets these houses apart from a terrace in Hayle: open stairwells with a landing looking down into them, high ceilings in the living room, tall windows on the sea side. The stairwell is the awkward part. It needs a tower or a staircase platform rather than a ladder, the floor beneath it clear, and a day or two when nobody needs the stairs, which is one more reason this work suits an empty house.

Feature walls are the most common ask for the living rooms and main bedrooms, one papered wall or a deep colour against the white, placed where it is seen from the sofa rather than from the door. On a let the rest is kept simple on purpose: one washable neutral across the house, a satin on the woodwork, and the specification noted so a touch-up in June matches what went on in January. Kitchens and bathrooms, where steam and cleaning products take the shine off fastest, get a finish that can be wiped.

A let that has just come through the season usually needs the hall, stairs and landing, the bedroom walls where luggage has scraped them and any bathroom ceiling gone spotty, done in a block over the winter. A family second home is more often one room at a time, done while you are away and photographed so you come down to a finished room rather than a job in progress.

On the slopes here the houses stand close together, share drives and boundary walls, and were often finished within a few years of each other, so the render fails on the same elevation at roughly the same time. Where two or three neighbours want their exteriors done in the same season, running them together makes sense: the tower or scaffold is on site once, the wash-down and drying use the same dry spell, and the paint either side of a shared wall goes on from the same date so it weathers evenly.

Each house gets its own quote and its own list, and nobody is tied to the other's decision. But if your agent looks after more than one house on the same road, or you know the neighbours, it is worth saying so when you get in touch.