Inside a 1970s or 1990s estate house
Most of Threemilestone was built from the 1960s onwards, in phases, so a house here is a semi, a bungalow or a detached house on a pattern that repeats across the estate, and the same things come up inside again and again. Textured ceilings that have gone grey. Walls papered straight onto the plasterboard when the house was new. Softwood skirtings and door frames under thirty years of gloss, MDF architraves from a later refit, and a layer of previous DIY on top: roller marks, wobbly cut-in lines, filler that was never sanded.
The ceilings need a word of caution. Textured coatings applied before the late 1990s can contain asbestos, so we never sand them. Keep the texture and it is sealed and given two even coats. Want it flat and it is tested first, then skimmed by a plasterer, and we paint it once dry. Paper on bare plasterboard is the other job that needs care: pull it off dry and the face of the board comes with it. It is steamed off gently, the board sealed and any tears filled before a mist coat goes on.
Woodwork is where an estate house looks most tired and where the biggest change is made. Old gloss is rubbed back so a new coat has something to grip, knots sealed where they have bled through, MDF edges primed because they drink paint, and doors and frames built up in two coats rather than one thick one.
Between Redruth and Truro
From our side, Threemilestone is about as easy as a job gets. It is a short run along the A390 from Redruth, nearly every house has a drive to pull the van onto, and there is room for a tower to go up outside without a permit or a closed pavement, which keeps an exterior quote simpler than the same house in the middle of Truro.
It is also a place where people go out to work, in Truro, at the hospital, on the industrial estate or further afield, so most of our jobs here run around an empty house. We take a key, start at eight and are cleared up by five, do one room or one elevation at a time, and send a photograph if you want to see the day's work before you get home. There are let houses here too, not least for people working at Treliske, and a redecoration between tenants is planned to the day the new one arrives.
Outside: render, dash, fascias and the garage door
The outside of a Threemilestone house is a cavity wall in cement render or pebbledash, often with dashed panels between smooth bands, painted boards under the upstairs windows, softwood fascias and bargeboards where they have not been replaced with plastic, and a garage door. No lime, no salt. The weather is ordinary west Cornwall rain and wind.
Cement render is a straightforward surface: hairline cracks raked out and filled, any blown patch cut back and made good, then two coats of masonry paint. Dash takes noticeably more paint and time than the smooth bands, and a quote that has not allowed for it is one to be wary of. The boarded panels and the fascias fail first, because they are softwood facing the weather with the end grain exposed. Sound timber is rubbed back, primed bare and given a full paint system; rotten timber is replaced, not painted over.
Garage doors are their own small job. A timber door is treated like the fascias. A metal up-and-over door is rubbed back, the rust spots taken to bright metal and primed, then finished in two coats, and the difference it makes to the front of the house is out of proportion to the size of the door. All of it belongs in the settled months from spring to early autumn, and the quote sets out what it covers, elevation by elevation, once we have looked at the house.