The last town west: a painter and decorator for St Just and the cliffs beyond it

St Just sits on the granite of the Land's End peninsula with the Atlantic a mile off to the north and west, Cape Cornwall below it and open moor behind, and few places on this list are as exposed. The wind brings rain from the south-west, then from the north-west, then round from the north once a front has gone through, and the wall that faced away from one storm faces straight into the next. There is no sheltered elevation to a St Just house, only ones that are wet slightly less often.

The walls are granite rubble, big irregular stones packed with smaller ones and lime, a couple of feet thick, either left bare and pointed or rendered over. Wind-driven rain is pushed into the face of a wall like that rather than running down it, the stone holds the water, and from November to April it does not dry. Nothing painted on the outside will keep a St Just wall dry through a winter, and a coating that seals the face traps the water inside until it blows off in sheets in the spring, taking the render with it.

Which is why the inside matters more here than the tin. A cottage that is heated evenly, ventilated properly (extractors that are actually switched on, trickle vents open) and finished in paints and plasters the wall can dry through will be sound by summer. One heated in the front room only, sealed up and painted in a vinyl silk will have black mould in the corners by February whatever the outside was painted with. So we talk about heating and ventilation before colour, and we say when a wall wants a plasterer, or a season drying out, before it wants us.

The exterior season is short and cannot be trusted. In practice it runs from late May to early September, and a settled week inside it is worth more than a forecast promising a month, because a wall coated on Tuesday that takes rain on Wednesday night has not been painted. And St Just is forty-five minutes from Redruth on a good day. A single door or one gable is a long way for us to come and we would say so. A job this far west makes sense as a whole property, inside and out, or as a run of days planned together with a neighbour's or a let's, so the van is here for a week rather than an afternoon.

St Just is a mining town before it is anything else. The square and the Plen an Gwary at the centre, the chapels and the pubs, then rows of granite terraces built for the mining families, thinning out along the lanes to Botallack and on towards Pendeen, where the engine houses at Levant stand on the cliff and Geevor sits above them. Inside, the houses are much the same whichever row they are in: small rooms, low ceilings, a steep stair, a kitchen in a later lean-to, and plaster that follows the stone underneath, so nothing is flat.

The work inside is patient work. Walls are filled with something that moves, lime plaster is kept lime, old distemper and layered emulsion are sealed before anything goes over them, and the woodwork is rubbed back where generations of gloss have rounded off every edge. One room at a time, because the house is lived in. Many of the terraces open straight onto the pavement, so the front is done from a ladder in the road, with a cone out and a word with the neighbours, and the back is reached through the house.

Outside, bare granite with sound pointing wants leaving alone. Where a house has been rendered, the render is what gets painted: washed to get the salt and the green growth off, cracks cut out and filled, then a masonry paint the wall can breathe through. Where a previous owner has painted the stone itself it is a judgement, strip it if it is failing, maintain it if it is sound, and we say which on the walk round. The old centre is a conservation area and the mining landscape around the town is a World Heritage Site, so the render is mostly white, cream and stone, and the colour goes on the sashes and the doors.

St Just has had artists in it for a long time and still does, with studios in converted chapels, workshops and outbuildings and galleries around the square. A studio wants one thing from a decorator, a flat, even white that throws no colour cast onto the work. Second homes and holiday lets sit in the same terraces as families who have been here for generations, and those are done through the keyholder in the empty months, with a photograph back as each room is finished. Every so often it is a shop, a cafe or a pub on the square, done after the July festival or in the quiet weeks after Christmas, with the reopening date fixed before we start. However far west, the job goes the same way: we look, the quote sets out what it covers, and we tell you when the weather has moved it.