Your home doesn't usually fail in the middle of a wall. It fails at the edges — where timber meets masonry, where a frame meets a sill, where the sealant gave up three winters ago and nobody noticed. As always – it’s the details that count.

Here in Dorset on the South coast, the weather doesn't knock politely. Wind-driven rain off the Channel finds every failed mortar joint, every shrunken bead of silicone, every hairline gap between a door frame and the stonework it sits in. And once water is in, it doesn't leave quietly — it rots timber, blows paint, stains plaster and quietly runs up a repair bill that could have been a maintenance bill instead.

At Upcycle Interiors Ltd (UIL) we spend a lot of our year at exactly these junctions. So for this post we've pulled together four recent exterior projects — doors, frames, pointing and weatherproofing from Weymouth to Poundbury — that all tell the same story from different angles: look after the edges, and the rest of the house looks after itself.