Painting a storage shed? Choose the right scaffold.

For a storage shed you hire the Altrex Mi Tower, a tower 75 cm wide that is made for work by one person. That suits this job: you are on your own, you carry no heavy material up with you and you want to shift the pitch along without help. It is light enough to put up single handed and goes through a garden gate or along a narrow path beside the fence. What the model amounts to is set out on the page where you can hire the MiTower.

The reach fits as well. This tower runs from 4.2 up to 6.2 metres of working height, which is ample for a shed whose eaves sit at about two and a half metres. On the deck, 245 cm long, there is space for a tin of paint, a sander and a rag without your having to step over them every time. At a single wall of a storage shed you simply do not need more floor than that.

Working with two of you, or taking on the house in the same round, you would do better to hire a mobile scaffold that climbs higher, such as the RS51 at 75 cm. A room scaffold falls away, since that model is meant for indoor work behind a door and comes nowhere near the eaves of a shed. Torn between the two towers? The piece on choosing between a mobile scaffold and a MiTower lines the differences up.

The highest point of a storage shed is nearly always the eaves or the fascia board, and on a brick or timber garden shed that sits at roughly two to three metres. A working height of 4 to 6 metres belongs with it, because that figure is not the height of your deck: to the platform height about 2 metres of reach is added. So you stand at two to four metres and work comfortably over the eaves. What goes with it is shown at the towers with 4 metres working height.

At a shed you measure from the grass and not from the terrace next to it. Gardens are seldom level, and a shed often stands raised on a few slabs or tucked into a lower corner at the back. If the roof has an overhang, or the fascia at the rear needs making good too, count that in: reaching over such an edge asks for more height than you would guess from below. Look at the figures for heights on the ground floor as well.

Hiring too low is the mistake most often made here, precisely because the job looks so straightforward. With your head just under the eaves you paint the top board by feel and cannot see the junction. Worse, a pitch that stands too low tempts you into standing on the top rail, which is exactly what you are hiring the tower to avoid. Take the roomier size straight away; it costs you hardly anything more in the end.

At a storage shed the scaffold almost never stands on pavement. Grass, garden soil, bark chippings or a half sunken slab path: that is the ground you have to work with, and it gives the moment weight comes onto it. So lay planks, paving slabs or stout boards under the castors, so the load is spread over a larger area. A castor that sinks a couple of centimetres puts the whole tower out of true, and you feel that only once you are on the deck.

Look at what the day before your build has done as well. After a wet night a lawn is a different surface from after a dry week, and on a freshly raked border you can do nothing at all. Keep room free around the foot for the stabilisers, on the fence side too, and check after a day of work that the pitch still stands as straight as it did at the start. How to handle a sloping or loose bottom is explained at a scaffold on uneven ground.

A free standing shed also means you must be able to get all the way round. Walk the four sides before you hire: if the back stands forty centimetres off the fence, no pitch will fit there and you either work that wall from the side or empty the shed and turn to it another way. Clear away garden furniture, the water butt and the compost heap before the parts are delivered, because you do not want to manoeuvre between obstacles with your arms full.

A shed has four walls, a door with a frame and an eaves edge, and that is more work than it looks from a distance. On timber there is rubbing down, filling and often a primer to add, and on a brick shed the first morning goes on making good pointing and render edges. For an average garden storage shed you therefore hire the tower for two to three days, with a day extra if the door and the frames are getting a coat as well.

The rest of the time goes on waiting and on the weather. Stain and paint on timber have to dry before the second coat can follow, and outdoors that asks for a dry afternoon with no fierce sun on the wall. Working in autumn, the morning dew on a timber wall is reason enough not to start before ten. Through all those hours the scaffold is standing there anyway, so you simply count them into your hire period.

That is less expensive than it sounds. Only the first twenty four hours run at the full rate; for the days that follow, the discount of 95 per cent leaves no more than a fraction to pay. Booking one day extra is therefore a small matter. On a job you do alone that is welcome, because single handed you work more slowly than a pair would. How many days other people allow is in the overview with guidance on the number of hire days.

With a deck of 245 cm you have almost a whole wall in front of you on a shed three metres wide. Work that wall from the top downwards, so the eaves and the upper boards first and the rest afterwards, and no drips land on a finished stretch. On a shed of four or five metres you move once per wall. Check the corners and the junction at the eaves before you climb down, because that is where something is most often left.

Since you work alone, every trip down is one you make yourself. Put your paint, brushes, abrasive paper and a rag in a bucket and take that up in one go. Lay the brush you are not using in the bucket rather than on the edge of the deck, because from the ground you cannot pick it up without climbing the tower again. Leaving a second tin below is fine, but have a lid ready for it.

You move with an empty deck: take the bucket off, release the stabilisers, roll the tower on one wall further and set everything again. That costs five minutes a time and on a shed it happens four to six times per coat. So count your moves into the planning, because together they easily add an hour to each coat. Taking the summerhouse on in the same week? The approach for that is at painting a garden house.

You are sent a set of loose parts, complete and counted before it leaves, so you know exactly what is lying there. A set for one person is limited in bulk, so you carry it through to the back in a few trips. Do not simply drop the parts in the grass: on a pallet, a few slabs or a piece of sheeting they stay clean and dry. Reserved before 15:00 on a working day means you can have it standing in the garden the next working day.

You settle yourself which day the scaffold arrives and when we take it away again. With outdoor work you time the delivery to the beginning of a dry spell, so you can rub down straight away and get the first coat on. Assembly is yours, and with this tower it works on your own: the parts are liftable and you build upwards from the deck. The manual and the video show the order exactly. More about that is in the assembly instruction.

Prefer to fetch it? That is possible free of charge and by appointment at Zeeburgerpad in Amsterdam, provided your car or trailer takes the parts, which with a one person set is rarely a tall order. If you have it brought, we collect the set after your last painting day, and you leave it dismantled and complete, ideally somewhere the van can reach. The amounts for bringing and fetching are listed per province with the costs of delivery.

Load class 3 to EN 1004 means the deck carries 200 kg per square metre. Painting a storage shed on your own you come nowhere near that with a bucket and a few tools, so the bearing capacity is not your problem. What does count is that you are alone: there is nobody holding the tower, passing things up or noticing that a castor is sinking. So make your fixed round of the castors and the stabilisers before every climb.

The rules stay the same as for high work, even standing at two metres. The castors are braked as soon as you step on, you never move the scaffold while you are on it yourself, and you do not shove it along a little by pushing off against the shed. People are slack about that precisely on low pitches, while a fall of two metres in a garden arrives just as hard as anywhere else.

Tell somebody you are working and keep your phone in your pocket rather than on the deck. Do not carry on in a strong wind: a garden looks sheltered, but between two fences there can be a fair pull. In rain, watch the platform too, because wet aluminium under garden shoes full of grass is treacherous, and from two metres you land as heavily as from four. The further arrangements are at the rules around working at height.