Repainting a cottage front that stands on the pavement
A lot of Chacewater's older houses have no front garden. The door opens onto the pavement and the pavement onto the road everything in the village uses, and that changes an exterior job before a brush is picked up. A tower or scaffold on the footway needs a licence from Cornwall Council as the highway authority, it has to leave a way past for pushchairs and wheelchairs, and it cannot sit in the road without more paperwork still. We sort that out as part of the quote, allow for the days it takes to come through, and time the wash-down and the messy stages for when the street is quiet. Sometimes ladders and care will do a two-storey front; we say on the walk round which it will be.
Then there are the neighbours. In a terrace the walls run into each other, and the line where your paint stops and theirs starts is going to be looked at every day. We agree that line with you and, if you want, with next door, cut it clean at a natural break such as a downpipe or the edge of a quoin, and keep their wall, their window and their doorstep free of splashes and dust. The best outcome is a whole terrace doing the frontage together: agreed colours, the same product, one set of access equipment and every join disappearing. It usually works out cheaper per house than five separate jobs, and it is worth suggesting to the neighbours before you book.
Colour matters more here than on a house set back in a garden. A cottage front is seen from a metre away and from the far end of the street at once, so strong colours can shout and pale ones show the dirt from the road. We sample a patch on the wall against the granite next door before committing, and older solid walls get a breathable masonry paint so a wet winter can dry out of them.
Inside a cottage that has grown at the back
Chacewater cottages rarely stop where they started. Most have a kitchen extension, a bathroom over it, sometimes a room in the roof, so inside there is a join between a solid granite wall with lime plaster on it and a modern cavity wall with plasterboard, often in the same room. They take paint differently and they crack differently, so we treat each surface for what it is rather than rolling one product over the lot. The old plaster is washed, sized where it is chalky and filled with something flexible; the new board gets a mist coat and a straightforward two coats.
The other regular job is the low, bowed ceiling in the original part, which is fine and part of the house, and the beams and boarding around it, which need the right primer or the tannin bleeds through white paint within a month. It is a lived-in job, one room at a time, and the room is back in use the same evening.
Old mining ground, mundic and cracked render
Chacewater is in the middle of the old mining district. Wheal Busy is a short walk away and the ground down through the Poldice valley towards Bissoe is riddled with workings, spoil and old shafts. That history turns up in the houses in two ways.
The first is mundic. Between roughly 1900 and 1950 a lot of Cornish concrete and block was made with mine waste as the aggregate, and some of it slowly breaks down. If your house or an extension is concrete block from that period, a surveyor's mundic test is the thing to have, and paint is not a repair for it. The second is ground movement. Some Chacewater render cracks because the ground it stands on has settled over old workings, and a crack that keeps reopening year after year is telling you something about the structure, not the paint. Hairline cracks in sound render we rake out, fill and paint over, and they stay closed. A crack you can put a coin in, one with a step in it, or render that sounds hollow across a panel, we point out and leave for a builder or a structural engineer first. The quote sets out which is which once we have tapped the walls.