Interior painting in Yalova for owners who are away

A flat in Yalova that is locked in September and opened in June spends the wet half of the year with no heating and no air movement. Yalova sits on the south shore of the Sea of Marmara, so the winter air is cold and damp rather than dry. Moisture that a lived in home would lose through open windows and extractor fans instead settles on the coldest surfaces: the inside face of external walls, the corners where two outside walls meet, and the wall behind a wardrobe pushed flat against them.

That produces a pattern we see in almost every closed up flat we open in spring. A musty smell in the hallway. Grey or black speckling in the top corners of the rooms that face north. Paint that has lost its grip in a band near the skirting on a seafront facade. Sometimes a bloom of white salts pushing through the paint on a wall that faces the water in Çınarcık or Armutlu. None of that is a decorating problem yet, and treating it as one is how owners end up paying twice.

The practical consequence for an absentee owner is that the first visit of the year is the wrong moment to discover it. A survey in March or April, done by a keyholder letting us in, tells you what the winter actually did while there is still time to act before you arrive.

The sequence is built so that you make decisions from written information rather than from memory of the flat. First you name a keyholder in writing: a neighbour, the building manager, the site caretaker, a relative or your letting agent. We do not accept a key from anyone the owner has not named in a message to us. Second, we survey the flat with that person present and photograph every room, including the corners and the walls behind furniture, so the quote rests on what is there and not on a description.

Third, you receive a written quote with labour and materials on separate lines and the product named, so you can see what you are approving. Fourth, you approve the scope and the colours in writing. Colour is the step that most often goes wrong at a distance, so we photograph the sample on your own wall in daylight rather than sending a colour code and hoping it matches your screen.

From there the work runs on dates you have agreed, with a photo report after each stage, and it ends with the keys going back to the same person who handed them over unless you name somebody else in writing.

The honest answer is that a single photograph of a finished room proves very little, because most of what you are paying for gets covered by the next layer. So the report is staged. You receive photographs of the flat as we found it, of the furniture covered and the floors and skirtings masked, of the walls after the old coating has been scraped back and the cracks filled, of the primer on the repaired areas, of each coat, and of the flat after the final clean.

Two details make that report checkable rather than decorative. The photographs of each room are taken from the same position each time, so the before and after images line up and a wall cannot quietly be swapped for a different one. And the leftover tins are photographed with their labels readable and left in the flat, so you can confirm months later which product and which colour code went on your walls.

On request we also send one continuous video walkthrough at handover, and your keyholder walks the flat with us and confirms in writing that the rooms are finished and clean. If something is wrong in the photographs you can say so before we leave the site rather than in July.

Mould on the inside of an external wall is a symptom of a wall surface that stays cold and a room that never dries out. Painting over it hides it for a few months and then it returns through the new coating, usually in the same corner. The World Health Organization treats persistent indoor dampness and mould as a health issue in its own right rather than a cosmetic one, which is why we report it to you in writing instead of quietly painting across it.

What we do on a closed up flat is remove the affected coating back to a sound surface, clean and treat the area, dry it, and only then prime and paint. Where the cause is clearly structural, a failed seal around a window, a leaking riser in the shaft, a balcony draining back into the wall, we photograph it and tell you plainly that paint is not the fix, because a new coat applied over a live water path fails within one winter.

For a flat that will be closed again in autumn, the durable answers are usually about the building rather than the finish: leaving wardrobes a few centimetres off external walls, leaving internal doors open so air can move, having the keyholder open the windows on a dry day once or twice over the winter, and in the longer term insulating the facade so the internal wall surface stays warmer.

Work backwards from your flight. Finishing two to three weeks before you land gives the flat time to be aired properly and gives us time to correct anything you flag in the photographs. Water based interior paints lose their strong smell within about a day of cross ventilation, but a shut flat ventilates slowly, so the margin matters more here than in a home somebody lives in.

The season itself is flexible indoors, with one caveat: most water based interior paints are not meant to be applied in a room colder than roughly five degrees, and an unheated Yalova flat in January can sit near that. Painting in winter therefore means heating the flat during the work and accepting slower drying between coats. February to April is usually the calmest window for interior work on an empty flat, well before the summer rush in Çınarcık, Armutlu and Termal.

If the flat is let to short stay guests, the useful slot is between bookings or before the season opens in late spring. Tell us the arrival date when you ask for the quote and we schedule to that date rather than to the first free slot.

Nothing about the payment requires you to be in the country or to carry cash. The usual route is a bank transfer from your own account to a Turkish business account, and we issue an invoice for the work so that you have a document with the amount, the date and the scope on it. Some owners prefer to have a relative or their letting agent in Yalova pay locally on their behalf, which is equally workable as long as you confirm in writing who is authorised to do it.

We split payment into stages tied to the photo report rather than asking for everything up front, so each release follows evidence that the stage it covers is finished. The stages, the amounts and the currency are set out in the written quote before any work starts, and we do not change them mid job without a new written agreement.

Ask about bank charges early. An international transfer can arrive short of the invoiced amount because of intermediary fees, and it is better to agree in advance who absorbs that difference than to discover it at the final payment.

Everything that matters is agreed in writing in English or Arabic: the survey findings, the quote, the colour approval, the key receipts and the stage reports. We use WhatsApp for this deliberately. It is where most owners already are, it timestamps every message, and it means neither side has to rely on what was said on a phone call months earlier.

Be aware of one limit and plan around it. The team on site works in Turkish, and a keyholder who speaks Turkish makes the day to day smoother for everyone. Questions that come up during the work reach you through the written thread rather than through a conversation on the landing, which is slower by an hour or two but leaves a record.