Expert Painters

Getting a Holiday Home Ready Before Summer

27 Oct

A holiday home is a different maintenance problem from a house you live in. It sits closed up for ten months, gets used hard for two, and nobody is there to notice when something small starts going wrong.

That is the whole issue. It is rarely neglect. It is that a blocked gutter in a house you live in gets noticed within a week, and in a holiday home it runs for an entire season and takes a fascia board with it.

Why coastal holiday homes deteriorate faster than they should

Four things compound while the house is empty:

  • No ventilation. A closed house in a damp coastal winter grows mould, particularly in bathrooms, in wardrobes and on south-facing internal walls
  • Salt is never washed off. On a lived-in house, hosing and general use removes some of it. On an empty one it builds on the paint film and keeps drawing moisture into it
  • Small leaks run unseen. A failed sill, a cracked sealant joint or a loose flashing has a full season to do damage before anyone sees a stain
  • Decks and outdoor timber take a year of UV with nobody oiling them

None of this is dramatic on its own. Together, over three or four years, it turns a maintenance job into a repair job.

November is the window, and it is a narrow one

The timing is forced on you from both sides.

The work needs to be finished before the house is in use or let out over December and January. And once February arrives you have missed the summer the work was for, so it slips another year.

That leaves November, which is also when every other coastal owner wants the same fortnight, and when crews working the Peninsula, the Bellarine and the Surf Coast are at their busiest. Booking in September or October is the difference between getting it done and being told to try next year.

Access is the real obstacle, and it is solvable

This is the part that stops holiday home maintenance more often than money does. The owner lives in Melbourne, the house is two hours away, and taking a day off to let a painter in defeats the purpose.

What actually needs arranging:

  • A reliable access method: a lockbox, a key with a neighbour, your property manager or your letting agent
  • Power and water on at the property, which sounds obvious and is the most common thing we arrive to find switched off
  • Somewhere to park and somewhere to set up, particularly for exterior work
  • Confirmation nobody is arriving mid-job, because a family turning up to a half-prepped house is nobody’s good day
  • A way to approve variations remotely, with photographs, if something is found once the surface is opened up

We work this way routinely. You do not need to be there, but the access and the services do need to be sorted before day one rather than on the morning.

If the house is let out

Short-stay properties have a tighter problem again, because the gaps between bookings are short and the peak weeks are the valuable ones.

The practical answer is to take a block in November rather than trying to fit work into changeover days. A two-day gap between guests is not enough for an exterior: preparation, coating and cure do not compress, and a surface that is touch-dry is not cured.

It is worth doing the arithmetic. Blocking out a week in November costs you a low-season booking. Blocking the same week in January costs several times that, and doing nothing costs you the reviews when guests photograph a mouldy bathroom ceiling.

What to prioritise on a coastal house

If the budget will not cover everything, this is the order that protects the building:

  • The weather side first. On most Victorian coastal properties that is the seaward and western elevations, and they will need attention years before the sheltered faces
  • Window frames, sills and the bottom rails of doors, which are where rot starts and where repairs get expensive fastest
  • Fascia, barge boards and eaves, especially at mitred joints
  • Decks, balustrades and outdoor timber, which get the most use in the weeks the house is occupied. Our posts on getting a deck ready for summer and deck restoration cover the detail
  • Interior bathrooms and ceilings, where mould shows up first

Everything else can wait a year. Water getting into timber cannot.

Two things that are specific to the coast

Salt has to be washed off before anything is applied, every single time. Painting over salt deposits traps them under the film and it lifts within a couple of summers regardless of how good the product was. If a quote does not mention washing down, it is not a coastal quote.

Mould has to be treated, not painted over. A mould-stained ceiling coated with a standard interior paint will have mould back through it within a season, because the spores and the conditions are both still there. It needs killing, the surface cleaning properly, and then attention to why the room has no airflow. Exhaust fans that vent into a roof space rather than outside are a common culprit in older coastal houses.

Where you see white crystalline deposits on masonry, that is moisture moving through the wall. Our post on efflorescence explains what it indicates and why coating over it does not work.

The case for not repainting the whole house

Most coastal holiday homes get repainted entirely, every eight or ten years, because that is how houses are normally done.

On an exposed coastal property it is usually the more expensive path. The seaward elevation fails in a third of the time of the sheltered ones, so a whole-house repaint means either doing the protected faces long before they need it, or letting the exposed face go far too long.

Doing the weather side on a short cycle and the rest on a long one costs less over twenty years and keeps the building in better condition throughout. We are happy to quote it both ways so you can see the difference. For timber homes, our guide to weatherboard painting covers the preparation that makes the difference.

What we do for holiday homes

  • Exterior repaints specified elevation by elevation rather than as one job
  • Salt wash-down, timber repair and rot replacement before coating
  • Deck, balustrade and outdoor timber restoration
  • Mould treatment and interior repaints, including bathrooms and ceilings
  • Window, sill and door repair
  • Scheduled maintenance visits, so it stops being a crisis every few years

We work the coast regularly, including Portsea, Sorrento, Barwon Heads, Torquay and Phillip Island, from our base in Richmond.

Call 0404 330 332. Send photographs if it is easier than meeting us there, and tell us when the house is next empty.

đź“Ť Our Service Areas Across Melbourne, the Mornington Peninsula, Surf Coast & Phillip Island

Melbourne & Bayside

Phillip Island & Bass Coast

Surf Coast & Bellarine Peninsula

Tags:
, , , ,
Back to list
Older New Year Garage Project: Gym, Workshop or Home Office

Related Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *