Painting a balcony railing? Choose the right scaffold.

For a balcony railing you hire the Altrex RS51, a mobile scaffold that is only 75 cm wide. That width is no luxury here but a condition, because the tower usually has to travel round the back: through a garden gate or along a path beside the fence. At a block of flats it also helps that this width does not block half the pavement or a whole parking bay. The range is listed with the mobile scaffolds we rent out.

On the platform you never miss the extra width. At a railing you work close to your hands, with a brush, a small kettle and an abrasive sponge beside your feet, and you move mainly sideways along the bars. What counts here is the platform length of 245 cm, because that decides how many metres of railing you finish from one pitch. A wider deck brings you not one centimetre nearer the bottom rail and only leaves you more parts to carry round the back.

The wide RS52 at 135 cm becomes interesting only if two of you are working, or if the railing is part of a larger refurbishment with sheet material. For a railing alone the access route weighs heavier than the floor area, because a tower that will not fit round the back has been hired for nothing. Measure your narrowest gate against the figures in the overview of mobile scaffold sizes. If it is tight, take the narrow build without hesitating.

At a balcony railing the highest point is the top rail, so that is what you measure to. With the balcony on the first or second floor that rail sits at roughly 4 to 6 metres and you hire 6 to 8 metres of working height. Those two figures differ because the quoted working height is the height of your platform plus the reach of a person standing on it, roughly 2 metres. The matching build is shown with the towers at 8 metres working height.

For this job you do not want your deck as high as possible, but roughly level with the balcony floor. Then the whole railing stands in front of you: the top rail at chest height, the bars straight ahead and the bottom rail down by your feet. Measure from the ground where the castors will stand, not from your front doorstep. A back garden can easily sit half a metre lower than the street, and that half metre quietly gets hired too.

Hiring too tight shows up in your back. One deck position too low and you paint the top rail with your arms above your head while the paint runs into your sleeve. Stand too high and you finish the bottom rail bent double all day. A set with several platform positions solves that, because you can hang the deck at whatever height suits the coat you are on. For a balcony on the second floor that makes a real difference.

The tower goes beside the balcony, not underneath it. Stand underneath and you have the balcony slab over your head and you are looking at its soffit instead of at the railing. Set the pitch just past the side of the balcony, so the railing runs along the edge of your deck and you can get at it from outside. Allow for the slab overhang while you build: you are going up alongside it, so leave a little play between the frames and the edge.

Under that pitch you want a flat, clear strip. The four stabilisers splay outwards and need room on every side, so reckon on more space than the scaffold itself occupies. Check what is in the way: a patio set, a water butt, planters, a bike rack or the lip of a raised terrace. On ground that falls away or on soft garden soil, the piece on setting up on uneven ground explains what to do.

At a flat or a portico block, settle the standing place in advance. The ground under a balcony is often communal, so tell the owners association that a tower will be there for a few days and that the passage gets narrower. That spot stays occupied for the whole hire period, because shifting the pitch in between costs you more time than the painting does. What else comes with such a building is set out in the article on scaffolds at an apartment block.

A balcony railing looks like an hour of work and never is. Every bar has a front, a back and two narrow sides, and between the bars you get in only with a slim brush. Then there is the preparation: degreasing, rubbing down, touching in loose patches and rust pits and cleaning out the bottom rail where the dirt collects. For an average railing of three to four metres you therefore hire a scaffold for three days, and four if the railing turns the corner.

Those days contain hours in which you can do nothing at all. The primer has to harden before the topcoat goes on, and a metal railing is wet with dew early in the morning while it looks perfectly dry. So you paint in the middle of the day, on a dry surface and with no showers forecast. That rhythm sets your hire period far more firmly than the number of metres does, and it is why the tower stands there a night or two with nobody climbing it.

When you book, that works out in your favour. The cost sits at the front: the first 24 hours are charged in full, and every hire day after that has 95 per cent taken off. Building in a day of slack costs you very little, while a half painted railing without a scaffold can cost you a week. Put your end date well after the day the last coat goes on. What a roomier period does for your planning is set out in the guide to hire days.

A 245 cm platform covers a little over two metres of railing per pitch. On a balcony railing of three to four metres that means two pitches for each coat, and on a corner balcony the short side comes in as a third. Work one bay between two posts at a time and finish that bay completely before you move on, so the joint always falls on a post and never halfway along a bar. It also tells you exactly where you left off after a drying break.

The division of the work is simple: everything facing outwards you do from the mobile scaffold, everything facing inwards from the balcony itself. Do those two sides shortly after one another, because paint that is already setting leaves a visible line where the two halves meet. Never reach around the corner of your deck for the next bay either: that saves you a move of two minutes and can cost you a great deal more than that.

Take up what you need for one pitch and no more: a small kettle, two brushes, a cloth and abrasive paper. Before you wheel the tower along, clear the deck completely, including the kettle you put down for a moment. Do not underestimate the number of bars, because that figure sets your pace and with it the number of days you hire. If the whole balcony is being tackled in the same go, look at the page on balcony work on the whole structure.

The mobile scaffold arrives in parts: frames, decks, braces and castors, counted and complete. Point out in advance where that stack may lie, because you keep the strip beside the balcony free for the pitch itself. A front garden, a drive or a piece of pavement works better, certainly if the frames still have to go round the back afterwards. Booking before 15:00 on a working day means the set comes out to you the next working day, so you can decide fairly late.

You choose the delivery day and the collection day yourself, and with paintwork you let the forecast decide. Have the set arrive a day before your first painting day: assembly takes half a day and after that you want to start rubbing down straight away. You put the tower up yourself, preferably with two of you, with the manual to hand and the instruction video on your phone. Which part goes on when is covered in the step by step build.

Collecting the set yourself is possible too: by appointment it stands ready free of charge at Zeeburgerpad in Amsterdam, provided your vehicle takes the length of the frames. If you have it delivered, we come back for it after your last coat. You break it down and put everything complete on the agreed spot so the driver can load in one go. The rate for bringing and fetching differs per province and is listed in the overview of delivery costs.

You stand on a platform built to EN 1004 and rated in load class 3, good for 200 kg per square metre. Painting a balcony railing you are nowhere near that with a kettle of paint and a few tools, so the weight is not your worry here. What does count is that the pitch stays stable while you work sideways along the railing. What that class actually stands for is explained in the article on this scaffold standard.

The balcony railing itself is no support. You do not lean the tower against it, you do not pull yourself up on it and you do not push the pitch straight with it: a railing that is due for painting is often exactly the railing whose fixings have gone. Do not step over your guard rail onto the balcony either. Brake the castors as soon as you climb on, and move the tower only with an empty deck and nobody on board.

The risks in this job sit in the gap and in the height. Between your deck and the balcony edge there is always an opening a brush or a kettle can fall through, so keep the ground below clear and warn the people on the terrace underneath. On an open corner of a building there is more wind than you feel below: stop when it picks up. Which rules apply beyond that is set out in the rules for working at height.