Autumn is when to book a Lelant house for the spring
If the outside of your house needs doing, the best thing you can do in October is get us round to look at it. Not because the work happens then. It mostly cannot. The spring and summer slots go to the people who asked first, and by the time the weather turns in April the calendar is largely set. An autumn visit means the quote is agreed, the colours are decided over the winter, and the house is on the list for the first settled spell.
Lelant needs that settled spell more than most. The village faces the Hayle estuary rather than the open sea, so the houses on that side get very little salt spray. What they get instead is wet air. Mist sits over the saltings on still mornings, the low sun in the older part of the village is off the north-facing walls for months, and after a wash-down the render on an estuary elevation can stay damp well into the afternoon when a wall in Camborne would have dried by lunch. Painting onto that is how a coat fails in its first winter, so we plan the estuary side for a run of dry days and give it the time it takes.
The walk round is where all of this gets decided. We check each elevation by hand, note which ones dry slowly and which take the wind off the Towans, and the quote sets out the preparation, the coats and the access it covers.
Villas, cottages and bungalows, most of them lived in all year
Lelant is quieter than its neighbours and more of it is home rather than holiday let. In the older part of the village are the cottages and Victorian villas, solid-walled, rendered or painted stone, with sash windows, bays and bargeboards that need the timber rubbed back to sound paint before anything goes on. On the older walls the coating is a breathable masonry paint, so moisture that has got into a thick wall over a wet winter can still get out.
Between the village and the main road, and up towards the golf course, are the twentieth-century detached houses and bungalows that make up a good part of Lelant. These are a simpler exterior: cavity walls, render or dash, painted fascias and a garage. The ones nearest the Towans take sand on the wind as well as rain, which scours paint off sills and the bottom of a wall, so those elevations get a fuller preparation and a proper two coats rather than a freshen-up.
A whole house over a couple of years
Inside, the usual Lelant job is not one room. It is a house that has been lived in a long time and is being brought round in stages: the hall, stairs and landing one winter, the ground floor the next, bedrooms the year after. One of our reviews describes exactly that pattern, a ground floor done one year and the first floor the next, and it is a sensible way to spread the cost and the upheaval in a house you are living in.
For it to look like one house at the end, the stages have to be planned as one job. We keep a note of every colour and finish, so the woodwork painted in year two matches year one, and we set the order so the rooms that get the most wear are done first. Where a villa still has paper that has been painted over several times, it comes off, the plaster is filled and the walls are lined before colour goes on, and that stage is worth doing early because everything else sits on it. We work around you, one or two rooms at a time, low-odour paints, and the room is back in use the same evening.