Painter and decorator in Constantine, where the damp comes off the trees, not the sea

Down towards the creeks, at Port Navas and along the lanes out towards Gweek, houses stand under oak and beech with water below them and a hill behind. The north and east walls hardly see the sun from October to April. Render there goes green, painted timber goes black at the joints, and a wall that was cream when it was painted is a mottled grey-green within a couple of winters. None of that is the paint failing. It is algae and lichen living on a surface that never dries out, and it will come back on any coating put over it.

So the job on a creek-side house is mostly washing, not painting. The wall gets a fungicidal wash, left to work, rinsed and left to dry, which under trees can take longer than the wash itself, and only then is it coated. Gutters and downpipes full of leaf litter and moss are cleared first, because an overflowing gutter is what has been feeding the green streak below it, and paint over a wet wall is wasted whatever the tin says. A proper exterior coating on a sheltered elevation here can last well. What needs doing every year or two is a wash-down, not a repaint, and we say so rather than quote for a full job the house does not need.

That is the difference from the open coast. At Porthleven or on the Lizard the enemy is salt and wind stripping a south-west wall. At Constantine the wind is broken by the hills and the woods, the Helford is sheltered water, and what gets a house is that it stays damp. The dry weather window for exterior work is the same, late spring to early autumn, but it matters more here that the elevation has had a run of dry days before the coat goes on, and that the sun reaches it at some point in the day.

The village itself is a different proposition. Constantine was built for the quarrymen. The quarries around the village turned out granite for a long time, and the terraces and cottages of the older village are made of it, with the chapels, the village shop and the pubs among them. Later came the bungalows and the small developments on the edges, so the housing runs from solid granite walls with lime behind the render to cavity walls and plasterboard, sometimes in the same house once it has been extended.

Granite walls need to breathe, so they get a breathable masonry paint and a filler that moves with them; a sealed coating on an old wall shows as blown render and damp plaster inside within a few winters. The village sits high enough to be airier than the creeks, and a terrace front on the street dries out in a way a north wall in the woods never will. Inside it is the usual run of cottage work, a room at a time: old plaster washed and sized before it is filled, woodwork rubbed back, and beams primed so the tannin does not come through the white.

A good many of the houses on the creeks are second homes or holiday lets, and their owners see them in August and the odd weekend. How we run a job for an owner who is not there, the keyholder, the quote by email, dates from the booking calendar, photographs as each wall or room is finished, is set out on our Carbis Bay page and works the same way here. The Helford difference is that these houses need a wash-down more often than they need paint, and a standing arrangement to do that each spring, before the letting season, keeps a rendered house looking cared for without repainting it every few years.