Composite doors in Probus, installed professionally.

Probus sits inland between Truro and St Austell, and it's a village that likes to remind you of its size — the tower of St Probus and St Grace is the tallest parish church tower in Cornwall, and it's visible for miles across the surrounding farmland. We've fitted doors in the shadow of that tower more than once, on cottages built from cob and granite that have stood for a couple of hundred years, and on the newer estates off the A390 that have gone up over the last twenty. Two very different jobs, same care needed.

Cob and granite construction throws up its own puzzles. Walls are thick, often uneven, and door openings can be slightly out of square without anyone noticing for a century. A composite door slab is rigid — it doesn't flex to fit a wonky frame the way a timber door sometimes could be persuaded to. That means the frame has to be packed and set dead level and square before the door ever goes near it, or you end up with gaps at the top on one side and a door that binds on the latch on the other. We take the time on the survey to check reveals in two directions, not just eyeball it.

On the newer builds around Probus, the openings are usually standard and square, so the job is more straightforward — but we still come across UPVC frames from the original build that have dropped slightly, and cavity closers that weren't finished properly behind the plaster. Worth flagging before we quote rather than after we've started cutting.

Village life here still runs through the shop, the pub and the church, and word gets round fast if a job's been done badly — that's as good a reason as any for us to do it properly the first time.

It's the kind of detail that only shows up once you've done a few dozen of these jobs in similar villages, but it's exactly why a proper survey beats a quote done from a photo.

Probus is far enough inland to avoid the worst of the coastal salt-laden gales that batter Cornwall's fringes, but don't mistake that for shelter — it still catches plenty of driving rain coming up the valley from the Fal, and doors facing south-west on the exposed edges of the village take a real battering over a Cornish winter.

Cob walls need to breathe, and that has a knock-on effect for door installation. We're careful not to seal an opening in a way that traps moisture behind the frame — cob that gets damp and can't dry out will eventually crumble, and no amount of fancy door hardware fixes that if the wall behind it is falling apart. Where we're working on an older cob property, we use breathable sealants and leave appropriate ventilation gaps rather than gunning silicone into every join out of habit.

On the estates, standard cavity wall construction means installation follows a more familiar pattern, though we still check cavity trays and weep holes are doing their job — a lot of composite door failures we get called out to fix elsewhere started life as water getting in somewhere it shouldn't, not as a fault with the door itself.

Endurance doors carry a 10-year guarantee and the slab itself doesn't rot, crack or need repainting the way an old timber door in a farmhouse porch eventually will, which matters when you're dealing with a building that's already earned its Grade II listing status in some parts of the parish.

We'd rather spend an extra ten minutes on site getting this right than come back in a year to sort out a problem that was avoidable.

Not every property near the church is listed, but enough are that it's worth checking before you commit to a colour or a style. If your house sits within a conservation area or carries listed status, there may be restrictions on what can go in the opening — some parishes are stricter than others about UPVC-look composite doors on street-facing elevations, though composite is generally viewed more favourably than plastic doors because it can mimic a traditional timber panelled look convincingly.

We'd always recommend a quick call to Cornwall Council's planning department before ordering if your property is listed or you're unsure — it's a five-minute phone call that saves a much longer argument later. For unlisted properties in the village, and for anything on the newer estates, there's no such restriction and you've got the full run of the Endurance colour range to choose from.

Where planning permission or listed building consent is required, we can help advise on styles that tend to get approved — traditional panel configurations, muted colours like Cornish Cream, Chartwell Green or Anthracite Grey tend to sit more comfortably with conservation officers than bright primary colours, though we've fitted plenty of Rosewood-effect doors on cottages that pass without a second glance.

None of this is meant to put you off — it's just part of doing the job properly in a village with genuine history. Get it right and a composite door on a cob cottage near that tower can look like it's always been there.

None of this is complicated once someone's actually looked at the property in person, which is why we don't quote sight unseen for anything older than a standard 1990s build.

Probus doesn't have a reputation as a crime hotspot, but rural doesn't mean risk-free — isolated cottages and homes set back from the road can be more vulnerable simply because there are fewer eyes on the property, particularly outside the summer months when passing footfall drops off.

Every composite door we fit comes with a PAS24-rated frame and a 3-star anti-snap cylinder as standard, which addresses the most common method of forced entry on UPVC and composite doors — lock snapping, where a burglar breaks the cylinder to get at the mechanism. It takes seconds with the wrong lock fitted and a lot longer, usually too long to bother, with the right one.

On the older cottages, we sometimes find timber door frames that have been retrofitted with a UPVC-style lock at some point in the building's history, and the fixings into old cob or granite need proper attention — screwing a modern multi-point lock keep into crumbling lime mortar isn't going to hold under pressure, so we use appropriate fixings and packers rather than assuming standard screws will do the job.

For the estate properties, the door is usually going into a straightforward timber sub-frame or direct into brick, and the main consideration is matching the door's security spec to modern building regulations, which our installations do as standard regardless of the property type.

It's a small thing, but it's the sort of small thing that separates a door that lasts ten years without a fuss from one that needs adjusting every winter.

There isn't one look that suits the whole village, because there isn't one type of house. On the cob and granite cottages, we tend to see customers gravitate towards traditional panel styles in Rosewood, Cornish Cream or Anthracite Grey — colours and configurations that echo the timber doors they're replacing without pretending to be something they're not.

On the newer estate homes, there's more freedom to go bold. Duck Egg Blue, Sage Green and even Black have all gone in on estate properties we've worked on locally, paired with chrome or black hardware depending on the rest of the house's fittings. Composite doors take colour well and hold it — no fading to a chalky pastel after five Cornish summers the way some older UPVC doors do.

Glazing is worth thinking about too. Village properties close to the road sometimes prefer obscured or decorative glass for privacy, particularly where the front door opens straight onto a lane rather than behind a garden wall. Estate properties set further back often go for clearer glass designs to make the most of the light.

Whatever you choose, we'll bring physical colour and glazing samples to the survey rather than asking you to pick from a screen — a swatch looks different in Probus daylight than it does on a laptop.

We're happy to talk through the options at the survey rather than push a single answer, because the right choice really does depend on the individual house.

Most installations in and around Probus take a single day, start to finish, whether that's a cottage by the church or a house on one of the estate closes off the main road. We remove the old door, check and adjust the opening, fit and seal the new frame, hang the door and set the hardware, then clear up properly before we leave — no half-finished sealant lines or debris left in the porch.

Access can occasionally be a factor on the older lanes near the village centre, where parking is tighter and some properties are reached down narrow paths rather than a driveway — let us know when you book and we'll plan the van and materials accordingly rather than turning up and discovering the problem on the day.

We work throughout the wider parish as well as the village centre, covering the outlying hamlets and farms that fall under Probus for postal purposes, so if you're a mile or two out on one of the lanes towards Ladock or Grampound Road, that's still very much within reach.

As with every job we do, the finished installation carries our 10-year guarantee, covering the door, frame and hardware, so whether you're in a three-hundred-year-old cottage or a house built last decade, you're covered the same way.

It's a straightforward job when it's planned properly, and planning it properly is most of the work.