Painters and decorators in Hayle, from Foundry to Copperhouse

Hayle is a town where wallpaper stripping comes up more often than hanging. The Victorian terraces that run along the main road between Foundry and Copperhouse, and the streets that climb away from it, were built for the people who worked at Harvey's foundry and on the quays, and a lot of them have been papered again and again without anything ever coming off. Woodchip painted over four or five times, blown vinyl in the bedrooms, a hall with the original lining paper still under it all. The room is not ready for colour until that is gone.

We soak or steam it off, wash the old paste down, and then deal with what was hiding underneath, which in a house of this age is usually old lime plaster with cracks, loose patches and a surface nowhere near flat. That gets filled and sanded, and in most of these houses the walls are then lined before anything else goes on. Lining is not an extra here. It is what makes a papered wall look straight in a room that is not square, and it is what gives a painted wall an even surface instead of one that shows every ridge in the plaster when the afternoon light comes down the street.

If you are hanging new paper on top, we set the room out first so the pattern lands where you look at it, usually the chimney breast, and the break falls in the corner behind the door. Feature walls are the most common ask in the terraces, one bold paper and the rest painted to match. If you have bought the paper already, send us the details and the wall sizes before we come and we will say whether it suits the room and whether you have enough from the same batch.

The other thing the paper hides is damp. Hayle sits on an estuary, so the air is wetter than it is up the hill in Camborne, and the older solid-walled houses near the harbour and along Copperhouse Pool feel it most: a cold north-facing bedroom wall, the corner behind a wardrobe, the window reveals in a bathroom without an extractor. Black spotting on the ceiling or paper lifting at the skirting is normally condensation on a cold wall rather than water coming through it, but we check before we assume, because paint over a leaking parapet or a failed gutter is money wasted.

Where it is condensation, the walls are washed down with a fungicidal wash, allowed to dry properly and painted with a breathable emulsion rather than a vinyl that seals the moisture in. Kitchens and bathrooms get a finish made for steam, and we will tell you plainly if a room needs ventilation sorted before decorating will hold.

The twentieth-century housing that makes up most of the town, the semis and bungalows on the estates and the new houses going up on the edges, is a simpler job: cavity walls, plasterboard, a mist coat on new plaster and a colour change for the first owner. Whatever the house, we work in it while you live in it, one or two rooms at a time, low-odour water-based paint, tidy at the end of each day.

Outside, the houses that face the harbour, the quays and Copperhouse Pool take salt air off the estuary on every tide and the wind straight across the water with nothing to slow it. Render on those frontages goes chalky and green quicker than the same render two streets back, and painted timber on bays, sills and doors opens up at the joints. We wash it down, let it dry, bind anything chalky, fill and make good, and put two coats of a breathable masonry paint on the solid walls so they can still let moisture out.

The window for that runs from late spring to early autumn, when the surfaces are dry and the temperature holds overnight. On the estuary the drying time after a wash-down is longer than it looks, so we plan the weather-facing elevations for a settled week and tell you if the forecast has pushed things. Every exterior is walked round before we quote, with each elevation checked by hand, and the quote sets out the preparation, the coats and the access it covers.

Behind the dunes the housing changes again. The chalets and lets scattered across the Towans towards Gwithian are lightweight, timber-clad or rendered, sand-blasted on every side, and they come up for redecoration in the gaps between bookings. A full repaint fits the winter, a scuffed bedroom fits a changeover, and for owners who are not in Cornwall we agree keys and send photographs as each room is done.

Back in town it is the garages, sheds and workshops behind the terraces and on the estates that get forgotten. Timber doors, rendered block walls and painted metal frames all give up before the house does, and doing them in the same visit as the outside of the house means the ladders only go up once and the whole plot reads as one job.