A painter and decorator for Harlyn, one cove east of Trevose Head

Harlyn Bay is the wide, north-facing beach on the Padstow side of Trevose Head, with a stream coming down to it and a lane behind. The houses sit on the low ground behind the beach and on the slopes either side: a pub, a few older cottages and farm buildings, then a spread of twentieth-century bungalows and holiday houses, many rebuilt or extended in the last twenty years with the glass on the seaward side. St Merryn, the parish village, is about a mile inland and has the shop, the school and most of the people who live here all year. Harlyn itself is mostly let by the week or used by its owners in summer, with a handful of year-round households in between.

So nearly every job at Harlyn is a whole house, or the whole outside of one, done while it is empty and arranged by someone who is not in Cornwall when it happens. Redruth to Harlyn is about an hour by the A30 and the A39, and we come for a run of days rather than an afternoon. If the job is one bedroom, a decorator nearer Padstow would serve you better and we will say so.

Harlyn is more sheltered than the coves on the far side of Trevose Head, and less sheltered than it looks. The headland takes a good deal of the south-westerly wind, so a house here does not get the full Atlantic on its front the way one at Treyarnon does. What it does get is the north-westerlies, straight into the bay with nothing in the way, and salt in the air on every breezy day, landing on all four walls rather than only the one facing the sea.

Facing north has a cost of its own. The front gets little direct sun, so after rain it stays wet longer than the back, the green growth returns every winter, and painted timber on that side sits damp for weeks. It also dries slowly before it can be painted: a north elevation washed down on a Monday may not be ready for a coat until midweek, and we plan the order of the elevations round that.

So the render is washed to get the salt and the algae off, the cracks at the window corners cut out and filled, anything chalky stabilised, and the coating is a masonry paint the wall can dry through, in full coats. Timber cladding on the seaward side is cleaned or rubbed back, the end grain and joints sealed, and any soft or cupped board pointed out before we paint. The sheltered elevations often want a wash and a maintenance coat only, and the quote says which is which.

Most of the newer houses at Harlyn have one elevation that is mostly glass: sliding doors, a big picture window, a balcony above with a rail. The paint on the timber round all that glass, the frames, the sills, the boards under the balcony and the rail itself, is the first thing on the house to go, because it faces the bay, it is thin compared to a wall, and water sits on the horizontal surfaces. When an owner tells us the house looks tired, this is nearly always the part they mean.

It is decorating work, not replacement work, as long as the timber is sound. The frames are rubbed back to sound paint, soft spots cut out and treated, bare wood primed, the joints and the bottom edges of the sills sealed, and the coats rebuilt rather than freshened with one. Aluminium frames are left alone. Balcony rails and decking are done in the same visit as the walls so the ladders and any scaffold go up once, with the scaffold dates set out so the agent can block them.

The window for the outside is late spring to early September, which is when the house is full. In practice that means the settled weeks either side of the season, late April into May or September into early October, booked early because they go. A dry week in March can carry the frames on the sheltered side, not the north front, and we tell you when the forecast has moved the job rather than coat timber that will take rain by morning.

A Harlyn house in January has the heating low and nobody in it, and the walls on the north side get cold. That is where the black spots in the corners come from, and no paint fixes it on its own. We say so, then put an anti-mould system in the bathrooms and bunk rooms, a wipeable emulsion on the halls and stairs that take the sand and the wetsuits, and a durable satin on the woodwork, in colours written down so the housekeeper can keep a tin for the marks between visits. Wallpaper on a feature wall is fine if the owner wants it, and we say which papers will survive being wiped.

The arranging is nearly always remote. Keys from the housekeeper or the agent, the list agreed by email, dates from the gaps in the bookings, a quote that sets out what it covers room by room and elevation by elevation, and a photograph back as each part is finished. If we find a leak or a rotten sill, you hear about it before we paint round it.