A town that lives here all year
Most of the north coast around the Camel empties in October. Wadebridge does not. It is the town the villages shop in, with the schools, the surgeries and the showground on its edge, and the houses are mostly lived in by the people who own them. That changes the work. Where Rock or Polzeath is holiday-let programmes done through an agent, Wadebridge is family homes: a whole house redecorated after a purchase, a kitchen and hall done before Christmas, the outside of a semi washed down and coated in the summer holidays while the owners are at the beach.
The old town is on both sides of the bridge, the long medieval one that gave the place its name, with Egloshayle on the east bank and the main street climbing away from the river on the west. The older houses are slate, not granite, because the stone here comes from the Delabole side of the county rather than from Penwith. Slate rubble walls are rendered, or hung with slate on the weather side, and plenty of the town houses have painted stucco fronts with bays and sash windows. Behind the old streets the town has grown a great deal in the last thirty years, and a large share of the housing is now modern rendered estates on the slopes, quick to decorate inside and needing the render looked at sooner than most owners expect.
Estuary weather, and what it does to render and timber
Wadebridge is a few miles up the estuary from the open coast at Padstow and Rock, so it does not take the full Atlantic salt that the coves do. It still gets the wind, though. The south-westerlies funnel up the Camel valley and the rain that comes with them lands hardest on the elevations that face down the estuary. On the older houses that is why one side is slate-hung and the other is not, and it is the slate-hung and rendered south-west walls, with the sash windows set in them, that need paint first and most often.
Modern render on the estates fails in a different way. Hairline cracking at the corners of windows and along the line of the first floor, green growth on the shaded north and east walls where the wind does not dry them, and a coating that chalks after a decade or so of sun on the south side. The job is the same one whatever the age of the wall: wash it down, cut out and fill the cracks, stabilise anything chalky, then two coats of a masonry paint that lets the wall dry through. On the old slate-and-lime houses that breathability is not optional, because a sealed lime wall holds its water and blows the render off in spring.
The exterior season here is late May to early September, as it is everywhere on the north coast, though the estuary gives Wadebridge slightly longer dry spells than the cliffs above Polzeath. If a wet week pushes the timber back we say so rather than paint wet wood.
Agents, landlords and the lets managed from the town
A good many of the holiday lets along the estuary and out to the coves are managed from offices in Wadebridge, and landlords with ordinary rentals in the town itself use the same agents. So a fair amount of the work that comes to us in PL27 arrives through an agent rather than the owner: a check-out report or a housekeeper's list, keys collected from the office, a quote by email that sets out exactly which rooms and elevations it covers, and a photograph back as each room is finished so the property can be marketed or handed to the cleaner without anyone driving out.
For a landlord with several properties across the town we would rather agree a rolling programme, one neutral specification used in every flat so touch-ups always match, and a straight answer each month on what fits and what does not. Tenants who are staying put are told the days in advance. Holiday lets get the full repaint, the bathrooms and the outside in the empty months from autumn to spring, and a scuffed hall or a bedroom between one Saturday and the next in season.
Making the drive count
Redruth to Wadebridge is an hour up the A30 and A39 on a clear day, and longer on a summer Saturday or during the Royal Cornwall Show in June, when the roads round the showground are best avoided altogether. That is further than most of the towns we cover, and it shapes what makes sense. A whole-house exterior, a multi-room interior, a run of lets for one agent, or a couple of neighbouring jobs planned into the same fortnight so the van is in the town for a stretch: those are worth it. A single door or one small ceiling on its own probably is not, and we would say so rather than quote for it badly.
Parking in the old town is tight but workable. The streets near the bridge are narrow and the car parks by the river fill on market days and in the school holidays, so for a house on the main street we agree where the van goes before the job starts. The estates have driveways and are no trouble. Wherever the house is, we walk round it with you, point out anything that wants fixing before paint, such as a failed gutter joint or a rotten sill, and the quote covers what we saw.