Carn Brea, the weather and when to paint outside
Redruth is built on the slopes below Carn Brea, and the hill decides a good deal about exterior work in the town. The south-westerlies come over the top, pick up speed on the way down and hit the west-facing gables and the upper floors of the taller houses hardest. Mist sits on the carn on days when the coast is clear, and the rain arrives sideways more often than it falls. A wall that faces the hill needs its coating renewed sooner than one that faces the town centre, and that is the elevation where preparation cannot be skimped.
That shapes the calendar. The best time of year for exterior painting here is the same as anywhere in west Cornwall, late spring through to early autumn, but the town's height means the walls dry out later in the season than they do down at Hayle or Falmouth. We plan exteriors for when the render has had a run of dry weeks behind it, and we build slack into the dates because a wet week in June is not unusual on this side of the hill.
Fore Street, the villas on the hill and the conservation area
Redruth was the mining capital of Cornwall when the mines were at their richest, and the money went into the buildings. The town centre, with its steep Fore Street and the granite and stucco frontages either side of it, is a conservation area and sits inside the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site. Around it, on Clinton Road and the roads climbing away from the station, are the Victorian and Edwardian villas and terraces built for the mine captains, merchants and professional families: bay windows, timber sashes, slate-hung upper storeys on some, deep skirtings and cornices inside, and more painted woodwork per house than almost anywhere else we work.
That woodwork is where the time goes. Sash windows on a three-storey villa need every layer of failed gloss rubbed back, soft timber cut out and repaired, bare wood primed and the coats rebuilt so the joints are sealed against the weather. It is slower than a modern casement and worth doing properly, because replacing the sashes on a house like this is not a small decision. Fascias, bargeboards and the timber to the bays go in the same visit.
In the conservation area, and on any listed building, colour and finish matter more than usual. Repainting an unlisted house in its existing colour is normally straightforward, but a change of colour on a prominent frontage, or any work to a listed building, can need permission from Cornwall Council. We will tell you when we think a check is needed before we quote, rather than finding out after the scaffold is up.
Village cottages and the later estates
Redruth is the town for a ring of villages that grew up around the mines: Lanner, St Day and the settlements strung along the roads out of town. The housing there is mostly granite and killas cottages, some left as bare stone, many rendered and painted, with solid walls and lime plaster inside. If you are wondering who paints render, a decorator does, and on a cottage like this the coating has to be one the wall can dry out through. Hollow or cracked render is cut out and made good first, the old chalky paint is bound, and only then does the masonry paint go on.
On the edges of the town the housing is later: council-built semis and terraces from between the wars and after, and private estates from the sixties onward. Cement render and pebbledash, uPVC windows and fascias, easier access and quicker to paint, but with their own faults: hairline cracking, staining under the sills, dash that comes away on the roller. We check all of that on the walk round, because the gap between a wash and two coats and a wall that needs repairing first is most of the price.
Landlords, HMOs and rented houses in Redruth
A large share of Redruth's older housing is rented, from single terraced houses let by local landlords to the bigger villas divided into flats or run as houses in multiple occupation. Landlord and letting redecoration comes up constantly in a town like this. Between tenancies that means walls and ceilings back to a neutral colour, woodwork repainted where it has been knocked about, stains sealed rather than painted over, and the place ready for viewings without standing empty for weeks.
In an HMO the job is usually done with people still living there. We agree which rooms and which days in advance, keep to them, and leave shared kitchens, bathrooms and stairwells usable at the end of every day. Durable finishes make sense in these houses: a scrubbable emulsion on the hallway and a hard-wearing satin on the woodwork cost a little more per tin and save a repaint.
For a landlord asking what decides the cost of redecorating a three-bed terrace here, the honest answer is the condition of the surfaces, not the number of rooms. Woodchip or layered paper to strip, plaster that needs making good, nicotine or damp staining, and the amount of painted woodwork all move the figure far more than the floor area does. We look at every house before quoting, and the quote says what preparation has been allowed for.