Painter and decorator for Trevose Head, where every wall is a weather wall

It is worth being plain about the place before the work. The headland itself is open ground with nothing on it to paint apart from the lighthouse and the lifeboat station, which have their own people. The houses are on the approach: along the lanes from St Merryn towards the point, above Mother Ivey's Bay on one side and Constantine Bay on the other, with Harlyn a little way back to the east. Some are year-round homes and farms. More are holiday houses, second homes and lets, and then there are the lodges of the holiday parks, which are their own kind of job.

So a Trevose Head job is nearly always one property standing on its own, with no neighbour to break the wind, and nearly always an exterior first. The interiors follow the same rules as the rest of the parish: walls that take a wipe and a touch-up, an anti-mould system in the bathrooms, and the rooms done in the empty months from November to March through whoever holds the keys. But it is the outside that brings people to us here.

Trevose Head is about an hour from Redruth by the A30 and the A39, and at the end of it is a lane, not a town. We do not come this far for one sill. A whole exterior with the garage and the timber, a house inside and out while it is empty, or two or three properties on the same lane in the same fortnight make the run worthwhile, and we say which it is when the job comes in.

A decorator does, and the difference between a coat that lasts out here and one that peels by the second spring is almost entirely in what happens before the tin is opened. The wind arrives across open water from the south-west and the north-west with nothing in its way, carrying salt on a dry day and driving rain on a wet one. There is no lee side to a house on Trevose Head worth the name, and every wall holds salt that will lift any coating put over it.

So every wall is washed first, properly, with the salt and the green growth taken off and the surface allowed to dry. Then the render is checked by hand and by ear: chalky paint that comes off on your palm needs stabilising, render that sounds hollow needs a builder before it needs us, and we say which patches rather than paint over them. Hairline cracks at the window corners are cut out and filled, because that is where the rain gets in behind. Then two full coats of an exterior masonry paint the wall can dry through, on modern render and on the older stone-and-slate farmhouses more than anywhere, since a sealed solid wall holds its winter water until the render comes off in sheets.

Painted timber goes sooner than render and gets more time. Fascias, soffits and bargeboards, the frames of the big windows put in for the view, doors, sills and the timber cladding that newer houses out here often carry: all of it is rubbed back to sound paint, soft wood is treated or pointed out for replacement, bare wood is primed, and the joints and end grain are sealed before the coats are rebuilt. Garages, gates and outbuildings go in the same visit so the ladders only go up once.

The best time of year for exterior painting anywhere in Cornwall is late spring to early September, when surfaces dry between showers and the nights stay mild enough for a coat to cure. On Trevose Head those are the only weeks that work, and they are the weeks the lets are full, so the practical answer is the settled stretches either side of the season: late April into May before the first guests, or September into early October after the last. A forecast is not a window, and if the weather takes the days away we move the job rather than coat a wall that will take spray that night. Owners who want the outside done for Easter ask in the winter and keep September as the fallback.

An exterior quote here follows a walk round, not a photograph. We look at each elevation on its own, wash a patch to see what is under the salt, tap the render, press the sills, and note which faces take the weather, because they do not all need the same treatment. What moves the number is the state of the surfaces, how much render needs cutting out, how much painted timber there is, whether the wall is smooth or dashed, and how the seaward side is reached, which on a house built into a slope above a cove can mean a tower or a scaffold. The quote sets out what it covers, elevation by elevation, and anything that should be fixed before paint, a failed gutter joint, a cracked sill, a leak at the edge of a flat roof, is pointed out first.

For a let it runs through the housekeeper or the agent: keys from whoever holds them, dates from the booking calendar, the quote by email, and a photograph back as each elevation and room is finished. If a rotten board or a wall that wants a plasterer turns up on the day, we ring before going on.