Mother Ivey's Bay: a painter and decorator for a few houses on the side of Trevose Head

It is worth being honest about the size of the place before anything else. Mother Ivey's Bay is not a village. It is a cove, a holiday park on the slope above it, a lifeboat station on the headland, the coast path, and a small number of houses between the park and Harlyn, most of them holiday homes or lets, with a few lived in all year. The work is not about a front that a town looks at. It is about a building closer to the Atlantic than almost any other on this coast, which needs looking after because of it.

That shapes what we take on. From Redruth it is an hour or so up the A30 and out through St Merryn, and we do not drive that for a single door. What makes sense at Mother Ivey's Bay is the whole house: the outside washed, repaired and coated while the weather holds, the inside repainted in the same stay, the garage, the gates and any timber balcony or deck rails done while the ladders are already up. If a neighbour along the lane or an owner at Harlyn wants work in the same weeks, we plan the days together so the van is on the headland for a stretch rather than an afternoon.

The houses themselves are mostly twentieth-century and later, built or rebuilt to face the sea, with big windows, rendered walls, and a fair amount of painted or stained timber on the side that gets the view. Some are chalet-style, some are substantial. There is very little of the old slate and stone that you find at Port Isaac, so the questions here are about render, timber and glass rather than lime and listed walls.

The bay sits on the lee side of Trevose Head, so the headland takes the worst of the prevailing south-westerlies before they reach the houses. People sometimes take that to mean the place is sheltered. It is not. The cove faces north and east, and when the wind goes round to the north, which it does behind every front, it comes straight in off open sea with nothing in front of it at all, carrying salt onto every elevation. A house here has one wall that faces the wind less often than the others, and none that escape it.

Salt is what does the damage. It settles on render and dries into a fine crust that draws moisture, so the paint on the exposed faces goes chalky and dull within a few seasons, hairline cracks open and let rain in behind, and the coating starts to lift from the bottom of the wall up. Painted timber goes sooner: window frames, sills, fascias and any rails or cladding on the seaward side lose their sheen, then their film, then the timber underneath goes soft. It is the same failure as anywhere on the north coast, only faster, and the seaward timber will want attention more often than the render does.

Who paints render? On a rendered house it is a decorator's job, not a builder's, as long as the render itself is sound. We start by washing a patch to see what is under the salt, tapping the walls for hollow render, and pressing the timber for softness. Then the whole thing is washed down, loose and chalky paint stabilised, cracks cut out and filled, soft timber cut back and treated, bare wood primed, and a masonry paint the wall can dry through put on in full coats. Where render is blown or a sill is past saving, we say so before we start, because paint over a failed surface out here lasts one winter at best.

The best months for exterior painting in Cornwall are May to September, when the walls are dry and the nights stay mild enough for the coating to cure. Those are also the months the houses and the park are full. So the outside of a let here usually goes into the shoulders: a settled spell in late April or May before the main season, or September into early October after it. We book those weeks early, watch the forecast, and tell you straight when a wet week has moved the dates.

The inside is easier to time. From November to March the lets are empty, and a full repaint, the bathrooms, the woodwork and any wallpapering can all be done in one stay without a guest in sight. Owners are usually elsewhere, so the keys come from the housekeeper or the agent, the quote goes by email and sets out what it covers room by room, and a photograph goes back as each room is finished. We leave the house ready for the cleaner, and anything that turns out to be a plumber's or a builder's job is reported, not painted over.

For the few year-round homes here the questions are the same as anywhere: what decides the cost of redoing a three-bed house is the condition of the walls and woodwork, how much filling and sanding is needed, whether old paper has to come off, and how much of the outside is timber. We look before we quote, and we quote for what we saw, which on this headland usually means more preparation than the same house would need a few miles inland.