When can you do it? Between the last visitor and the first
The question we get asked first in Tintagel is not what it costs, it is when it can happen. A B&B, a hotel, a gift shop or a cafe on Fore Street cannot shut for a week in August, and nor can a let with the calendar full from Easter to half term. So the answer is the closed months. From November to March the village is quiet and the rooms are empty, and that is when the guest bedrooms get their repaint, the hallways and stairs their scuffs and bag marks put right, and the shop its ceiling and walls done with the stock covered and the door locked.
We plan that work from the end backwards. The reopening date, or the first booking, is fixed before we start, the rooms are taken in an order that keeps a route through the building, and each one is handed back finished and cleaned rather than half the house being in dust sheets for a fortnight. For a let it runs through the housekeeper or the agent: keys from whoever holds them, a quote by email that sets out what it covers, and a photograph back as each room is done, so nobody has to drive up to check.
In season it is small work only, a bedroom between a Saturday and a Saturday, a front door before a weekend, and we say plainly when a job is too big for the gap rather than leave a room smelling of paint for the next guest.
Slate and stone, and the render that came later
The old village is built of what came out of the cliffs. Slate was quarried along this coast for centuries, and the older cottages are slate rubble and stone under slate roofs, some left bare and pointed, some rendered and painted, with the Old Post Office on Fore Street the best known and one of the oldest. Around that core is the later village: rendered Victorian and Edwardian houses built for the first visitors, twentieth-century bungalows along the roads out towards Bossiney, and the guest houses and hotels that took the view.
Bare slate and stone with sound pointing is best left alone, and we say so. Where a wall has been rendered, the render is what is painted, and on an old solid wall it wants a masonry finish it can dry through, because slate rubble holds water the way granite does and a sealed face blows off in the spring. Inside the cottages the plaster follows the stone, the ceilings are low, and the walls on the seaward side carry damp through the winter, so filling is done with something that moves and a stain is traced to its cause before it is painted over.
Fore Street is narrow and in summer it is full, so the van does not sit outside a job on it in July. For any building that is listed, a change of colour on the front is checked with Cornwall Council first.
A cliff top facing the Atlantic
Tintagel stands on top of the cliffs with nothing between it and the open sea to the west and north-west, and the church of St Materiana sits out on the cliff edge on its own, which tells you what the wind does here. The south-westerlies come up over the headland loaded with salt, the winter storms follow from the north-west, and the seaward elevations of every house take driving rain and spray for months on end. A rendered house on the western edge of the village is about as exposed as any building in Cornwall.
That is why exteriors here are washed down before anything else. Salt on an unwashed wall lifts the coat that goes over it, and green growth on the north side comes off with the wash or it comes off with the paint. Cracks are cut out and filled, chalky old paint is stabilised, and the coating is a proper exterior masonry paint built up in full coats, with the west and north-west walls given the most care because they are where it fails first. Painted timber, the sashes and doors, the fascias and bargeboards on the guest houses, is rubbed back to sound paint, soft wood treated, bare wood primed, and the joints sealed.
The window for that work is late spring to early September, shorter up here than inland. A settled week inside it is worth more than a promising month, and if a wet spell has moved the job we say so rather than coat a wall that will take rain that night. Garages, outbuildings and gates are done in the same visit so the ladders only go up once.
The drive from Redruth, and what makes it worthwhile
Tintagel is the far end of our range, over an hour from Redruth by the A30 and the A39, and we are honest about that. A single door or one small room is a long way for us to come and we would say so rather than quote badly for it. What makes the run worthwhile is a job with some size to it: a guest house done floor by floor through the winter, a let inside and out while it is empty, a whole exterior in a settled week, or work planned together with a neighbour's so the van is in the village for a stretch rather than an afternoon. We look before quoting, and the quote sets out what it covers.