Villa and summer house painting in Yalova, managed while you are away

A summer house in Çınarcık, Armutlu or Termal is typically locked in September and opened again in June. Through that period the building has no heating, no cooking, no showers and no open windows, which sounds like it should protect it and in fact does the opposite. Yalova winters are wet, the ground stays damp, and a closed house takes moisture in through the walls and floor and has no way to lose it. The result is a house that smells of damp on the first day and shows its worst surfaces exactly where the furniture was pushed against a cold outside wall.

Outside, the damage is mostly ultraviolet light and water. South and west elevations lose colour depth and the render chalks. Timber shutters, pergolas, decking and garden gates go silver grey as the surface fibres break down, and once they have opened up they take up water and stay wet. Metal railings and balcony rails rust from the fixings outward and the rust runs down the render underneath them in brown streaks that will not wash off. Garden walls on the shaded side grow a green film.

None of it is dramatic in any single year, which is why it is usually discovered all at once after three or four seasons. A survey done in March or April, with the keyholder opening the house, turns that into a list with photographs and prices instead of a bad surprise in the first week of your holiday.

The first message we need from you is not a description of the work. It is the name and number of the person who can open the house, written in a message from you, because that is the only authority we accept for taking a key. Once that is in place, the survey needs one visit: we walk the house and the plot with your keyholder, photograph every elevation, every room, the woodwork, the railings, the garden walls and the plinth, and note what is sound and what is not.

You then receive a written quote in which the house is broken into parts: facade, interior rooms, timber, metalwork, garden structures. They are separate lines on purpose, because an absentee owner often wants to do the facade and the shutters this year and leave the interior to next year, and that decision is easier to make when each part carries its own price and its own duration.

Approval is written, and so is every change after it. If the crew opens up a shutter and finds rot underneath, you get a photograph and a price before anything else happens, not an adjusted invoice at the end. That rule is more important on a house nobody is living in than anywhere else, because there is no owner walking past to notice.

In a gated site the practical keyholder is usually the site management or the caretaker, and both are used to letting trades in for absent owners. Outside a site it tends to be a neighbour who stays all year, a relative, or the agent who handles short stay lets. Any of those works. What matters is that the arrangement exists in writing before the work is booked, rather than being improvised by telephone on the morning the crew arrives.

Our side of that is deliberately narrow. We accept a key only from the person you have named to us. We confirm in the message thread when the key is received, with a photograph of it and the date. We do not cut copies. At the end the key goes back to the same person unless you write and tell us otherwise, and that return is confirmed in the thread as well, so there is a record on both sides of who held the key and for how long.

If your house is inside a gated site, tell us at survey. Site managements often set working hours, restrict noisy work during the summer season, require notice before a scaffold goes up and ask contractors to register at the gate. Those rules change the schedule, and it is better to build them into the plan than to lose a day at the barrier.

A house has far more surfaces than a flat, so the report is organised by part rather than as one album. Each elevation, each room and each item of joinery gets its own short sequence: as found, prepared, primed, coated, finished. Photographs of an elevation are taken from a marked spot on the ground so the images stack, and the close range photographs of every repair are taken before the repair is covered, because after that they cannot be taken at all.

At handover you receive one continuous video walkthrough of the whole property, inside and out, in a single pass. That is the record most owners actually use, because it is hard to stage and it shows the house in the order you will walk it yourself. Alongside it, the leftover tins are photographed with their labels readable and left in a named place in the house, so in three years you can match a touch up to the original product and colour code without guessing.

The last piece of verification is not ours. Your keyholder walks the house at the end and confirms in writing that the rooms and elevations are finished and the property is clean. That is a second pair of eyes on the ground with nothing to gain from saying yes, and it is worth asking for even when you trust the photographs.

Plan backwards from your arrival date, and separate the outside from the inside because they want different weather. Exterior work belongs in the April to June window in Yalova, which gives runs of dry moderate days and keeps the wall out of the July and August heat that makes coatings skin over too fast. Interior work should finish two to three weeks before you land, because a house that has been shut ventilates slowly and the margin is what lets you raise anything you dislike in the photographs while the crew is still on site.

Order matters within that. Damp and mould treatment comes before any interior painting. Timber is stripped back and treated before it is coated, and that step is weather dependent too, so it is booked in the dry window rather than squeezed in at the end. If the house is let to summer guests, the whole programme has to finish before the first booking, and the first booking, not your own arrival, becomes the deadline.

A useful habit for owners who visit once or twice a year is to bundle the visit. The keyholder opens the house once and the painting, the deep clean, the air conditioning service and the garden work happen in the same window. It costs the keyholder one set of trips instead of four and it means the house is not opened and shut repeatedly through the wet season.

On a Yalova summer house the timber usually needs attention before the walls do. Shutters, pergolas, decking, gates and eaves boards face direct sun and wind driven rain with no shelter, and once the surface has greyed and opened, a coat applied straight over it sits on loose fibres and peels within a season. The work is sanding back to sound timber, treating it, and then applying a coating that flexes with the wood, which takes longer per square metre than a wall does and is priced separately for that reason.

Metalwork is the item owners most often leave too long. Rust starts at the fixings and at the welds, spreads under the old coating, and bleeds brown streaks down the render below. Stopping it means taking the rust back mechanically, priming the bare metal, and only then coating. Painting over live rust looks correct for a few months and then lifts in exactly the same places.

Garden walls, plinths and pool surrounds are the surfaces that stay damp longest, because they take splash from the ground and never get the sun that dries a first floor wall. They are worth treating as their own job with a coating chosen for a damp base rather than continuing the house colour around them out of habit.

The mechanism is simple and it does not require you to travel or to send cash with anybody. A bank transfer from your own account to a Turkish business account, against an invoice that carries the amount, the date and the scope, is the route most owners use. If you would rather that a relative or your letting agent in Yalova settles it locally, that works too, provided you name that person in writing as authorised to pay on your behalf.

Because a villa job runs in parts, the payment runs in parts as well. Each stage is tied to the photo report for the part it covers, so you are releasing money against evidence rather than against a promise. Those stages, their amounts and the currency are written into the quote before the first day, and a change to the scope produces a new written line rather than a surprise at the end.

One thing to settle at the quote stage rather than later: international transfers can arrive short because of intermediary bank fees, and larger multi part jobs make that difference bigger. Agreeing in writing who carries those charges costs one message and avoids an argument in the final week.