Being honest about the distance
Most of our year is spent around Camborne and Redruth, and Newquay is about as far as we go. Forty minutes each way up the A30 is fine for a job that runs a week or more, and pointless for a single wall that a decorator in the town could do the same afternoon. So we say it plainly: for a one-room touch-up you are usually better served locally, and for a hotel corridor, a communal stairwell, a block of six flats or a landlord with a dozen properties, the trip makes sense and we will make it.
What suits us in Newquay is the volume. The town has a huge number of bedrooms let by the night, week or term, and they come up for redecoration on a cycle. Once we are in town for a programme, the smaller jobs fit around it.
Hotels and guest houses between the last guests and Easter
Newquay grew as a resort in Victorian and Edwardian times and much of the accommodation still sits in buildings from then: tall terraces and villas near the town centre, along the cliff roads and out towards Fistral, converted long ago into hotels, guest houses and flats. They are solid-walled, three and four storeys, rendered on the front with bays, balconies and a lot of painted timber, and they take the full weather off the sea.
Inside, the work is corridors, staircases, landings and bedrooms in rotation, dining rooms and bars, and the back-of-house areas that guests never see but staff walk through all day. Nearly all of it happens out of season. A hotel that trades through the winter has us in on the floors it has closed, one at a time, with the finished rooms handed back before the next floor is touched. A guest house that shuts after October has a clear run, and the bedrooms, the breakfast room and the hall can be done in one block and left to cure before the first booking.
The outside of a four-storey seafront building is scaffold work, not ladder work, and it needs a dry spell that is hard to find between November and March. Where the front can only be done in spring, we plan the interior for the winter and the facade for the first settled weeks of the year, before the town fills, and the quote sets out which is which.
Blocks of flats, communal areas and lets that turn over every year
Away from the hotels, Newquay has a huge stock of flats: purpose-built holiday flats, older houses cut into flats, and the newer developments on the edges of town. The communal parts are where landlords and managing agents spend their decorating money: entrance halls, stairwells, corridors and lift lobbies that take suitcases, surfboards and sand all summer. Those are done in phases so nobody is shut out of their own front door, in a wipeable finish that can be touched up without repainting the lot.
Then there are the lets that turn over on a calendar: holiday flats between bookings, student houses at the end of the academic year, and the houses and flats let to seasonal staff who arrive in spring and leave in autumn. Those come back needing anything from a scuffed hallway to a full repaint, often with a gap of a few days to do it in. For an agent with a list of properties we keep one specification across all of them, collect keys, work through them in an order that suits the vacancies and send photographs as each is finished. That is the same way we work for landlords nearer home, and it is described on the landlord and letting redecoration page.
The new estates on the eastern edge of town, Nansledan among them, are a different job again: modern cavity walls, painted render and new plaster inside. Mist coats and first-owner colour changes are quick work compared with the old buildings by the sea.
Houses, and the weather at Fistral and Pentire
For homeowners the town splits in two. The older streets behind the town centre and near the seafront are Victorian and Edwardian terraces and villas: solid walls under render, sash or casement windows, bays with painted timber and slate sills, and plaster inside that needs proper filling before colour. The rest is twentieth-century housing spreading inland and along the coast road, rendered semis, bungalows and later estates, more straightforward to paint and usually with a drive to work from.
Anything on the headlands or the cliff roads has the exposure of Portreath and Perranporth with more height. Fistral and Pentire face straight into the prevailing wind, so a seaward gable gets salt and driving rain from the first floor up, and render there is washed down, dried and made good before a breathable masonry coating goes on in two coats, with the timber primed where the weather has stripped it. Inland the same house can wait a good deal longer between repaints.
Interiors are the ordinary run of things: halls and stairs worn by sand, a kitchen left with bare plaster, a ground floor this year and the bedrooms the next. We look at every job before quoting, and if a house is on its own rather than part of a programme we say whether it makes sense from Redruth or is better given to someone nearer.