Painting a dormer? Choose the right scaffold.

For paintwork on a dormer the Altrex RS51 will do, the model that measures 75 cm across. You carry almost nothing up on this job: a tin of paint, a brush, a small roller, some abrasive paper and a cloth. Those sit easily beside your feet on a narrow floor. The gain of this model lies somewhere else, namely in the route to the spot where the dormer sits. A gate, a garden door or a path along the boundary usually passes a 75 cm set and not a broader one.

If two painters are up there at once, or you are doing serious repairs first with filler and new timber, the wide RS52 at 135 cm is worth weighing up. That gives you a floor where material can stand without being underfoot. For a single dormer it is generally a luxury. Ask yourself whether you are painting or carpentering first, because the answer decides which width you hire. What separates the models in width, height and weight is laid out in the comparison of tower sizes.

More important than width on this job is that you can move the build. A dormer has a face and two cheeks, and you approach those three planes from different positions. A slim tower you roll a few metres sideways on your own; a wide one is far harder to shift across a garden path, certainly where slabs are missing or a tree root has lifted. Look through the models when you hire a mobile scaffold for outdoor work, and see which size suits your own garden.

The highest thing you touch on this job is the upper edge of the fascia board, which sits lower than most people assume. On a house with one storey and a roof, that edge often sits around 5 to 7 metres above the garden, and then 6 to 8 metres of working height is exactly enough. Where the dormer is in the roof of a taller building, the figure moves up with it and you pick a larger build. So measure before you hire, with a long tape or from an upstairs window.

What you enter when you book is the height your brush reaches, not the floor you stand on yourself. There is about 2 metres of reach between those two, so anyone hiring at eight metres of working height is standing at roughly six. On paintwork you want that floor just below the surface you are finishing, so you can pull the brush downwards and keep the coat even. How many frames belong with that is shown at eight metres of working height.

Stand too low and you finish the top strip of the fascia with your arms above your head. That gives runs, drips down your neck and an uneven film precisely where the rainwater travels. Standing too high is awkward on paintwork as well, because then you spend the day stooping over your work. When in doubt take the roomier build and hang the top floor a notch lower if that turns out to sit better once you start.

Under a dormer there is rarely a neat, level terrace. More often it is a border, a garden path running away from you or a strip of gravel along the wall. So look for the place where the wheels stand on something hard and flat: slabs, a drive or a well trodden path. On soft ground you put stout boards under the feet, or the build settles unevenly the moment you are working on it. Check that again after a day of rain, because ground that was dry on Monday need not still be so.

Then allow for the room the stabilisers take, which you set out on four sides. On paintwork a small zone comes on top of that for your tins, your masking tape and the bucket of water your brushes stand in. Do not put that gear on the floor above where you cannot get at it, but on a small table beside the build. If the pitch is an awkward one, read how to make it solid in the article on anchoring.

Finally look at what hangs or grows in front of you. A projecting bay, a pergola, an espalier tree or a shed roof holds the tower away from the wall, and every half metre of distance means reaching further with your brush. Prune that branch a week earlier rather than starting your first painting day with a saw. A garden cleared in advance can easily save you half a day once you have the scaffold on hire.

The painting itself goes quickly; the waiting takes the time. An average dormer is primed in a couple of hours, and a topcoat takes about as long again. But in between the timber has to be clean, dry and sanded, and between two coats sits a period in which you can do nothing. Add the repairs to the cheeks and the touching in of bare patches, and you arrive at three to four days with the build standing there.

The weather has the last word on this work. You do not paint in full sun on a south wall, not in the rain and not on morning dew. In practice that means starting once the dormer has dried off and stopping well before the evening chill comes in. It makes the workable hours per day shorter than you would like, so the number of days you keep the tower rises without your putting in more hours.

Happily, only that first day weighs heavily. You pay the full amount for the first 24 hours, and every rental day after it carries 95 per cent off, which makes a painting job full of drying time work out surprisingly well. So book a whole week at once instead of piecing three separate days together and hoping the weather plays along. How that spreads over a longer period is explained in the comparison of hiring by the day or by the week.

With a floor 245 cm long you stand in front of the full width of most dormers. That is what you want, because a fascia board brushed out in one pass gives a cleaner line than one done in two halves with a join in the middle. Start at the top with the fascia, work the cheeks next and finish at the frames, so you never have to lean over fresh work. Only move the build when a whole plane is done.

Take up what you actually need per round and no more. A tin standing open on a narrow floor is a tin that will go over at some point, so decant into a small kettle and leave the rest at the bottom. Hang your brush from the rail on a hook rather than laying it on the edge of the floor. Everything that falls on this job lands in your own garden or on the path you walk along yourself.

Do not underestimate how often you go up and down. Sanding, dusting off, priming, checking, filling, sanding again and only then the topcoat: that is seven rounds along exactly the same surface, and each one begins with a climb. It is precisely why a build with a fixed way up works better than a ladder you keep repositioning. If you take the gutter with the brush on in the same week, keep the tower a few days longer.

You are sent a complete set of separate components, counted and checked over: uprights, floors, braces, guard rails and stabilisers. Bookings completed before 15:00 on a working day go out on the next working day. Work out beforehand where that stack may lie, because during a painting job your shed or garage is usually already full of tins, brushes and dust sheets. A corner of the drive or a piece of grass beside the path is fine, as long as it does not stay wet there for days.

When the set comes and when it is collected you settle at the booking. On paintwork you tune those dates to the forecast: have it brought at the start of a run of dry days and not on the Saturday showers are promised for. If there is a day in that run when you cannot paint anyway, then that is the day you use for building the tower or for sanding. That way you lose no rental days waiting for better weather.

After the last coat we come and fetch the gear again. You take the build apart, gather the parts into one pile and leave them somewhere the driver can reach without trouble. Only do that once the paint has gone genuinely hard, because sliding a tower against a freshly finished cheek is exactly the mistake you have spent the whole week avoiding. What bringing and fetching costs is on the page with the rates per province.

On paintwork you never come near the 200 kilos per square metre the floor carries under load class 3 of EN 1004. Weight is not the problem here; your own behaviour is. People lean over the rail on this job to catch that last corner of the cheek, instead of climbing down and shifting the build a metre. Keep your waist inside the rail and move once more rather than stretching for it, however tempting the shortcut looks at the end of a coat.

The standing agreements hold: wheels braked before you step on, nobody aboard while it rolls, and no working on in a strong wind. Wind is your enemy on paintwork anyway, since dust, seed and leaves stick straight into a wet film and never come out again. Go round the four stabilisers again each time you reposition, even after a shuffle of only a metre; it is exactly on those short shuffles that one of them gets left up.

The risk that belongs to this job is a slippery floor. Paint, water from your brush bucket and sanding dust make a deck treacherous, certainly in smooth soles. Lay cardboard over it and replace that when it soaks through. Never set a tin on the edge of the floor and keep the ground below clear, because the garden chair you forgot to move is exactly what such a tin lands on. The remaining agreements are in the guidance on working safely at height.