Painting a bike shed? Choose the right scaffold.

What decides matters here is not the height but the route to it. You reach a communal courtyard through a small gate, an undercroft or a passage that is sometimes not even a metre wide, and everything you hire has to pass through it. The MiTower of 75 cm is built for that: narrow, light and with parts one person can carry alone. Measure that passage before you commit to anything, because a scaffold you cannot get in is worthless in a courtyard. Look at hiring a MiTower for the build you need.

On the site itself that width helps you again. Between the shed and the cycle racks, the bins or the back wall of the block there is seldom more than a metre to spare. A tower of 75 cm rolls through there without clearing half the courtyard first. The platform of 245 cm meanwhile covers a good stretch of wall, so per pitch you take in several posts and the piece of roof edge above them in one.

A broad mobile scaffold brings you little on this job. You do not take tubs of material up but a pot of paint and a brush, and that extra width will be against you at every passage and every rack. If the shed stands against the wall of a maisonette block, do check whether you have to get above the roof edge. What such a complex brings with it is described in the piece on scaffolds at a block of flats.

A bike shed rarely rises above two and a half metres, but that is not your measuring point. You have to reach the top of the roof edge, the fascia board round it and the underside of the roof boarding between the joists. If the shed leans against a blind wall or a block of stores that carries on higher, take the topmost edge that goes in the colour. Come out at three metres and a reach of 4 to 6 metres fits easily round that.

Order with the rule of thumb that your working height equals the height of your platform with about two metres of reach on top. For a shed that means a platform between one and a half and two and a half metres, so a low build with few frames. Do not mix that up with what the model can do: the MiTower reaches 6.2 metres of working height, and here you use only the bottom part of it. That setting shows in the build for 4 metres of working height.

Measure from the paving that the castors will end up on. Courtyards are often not level: there is a fall towards a gully, or the ground rises towards the stores. A difference of twenty centimetres already decides whether you work with three frames or with four. Starting too low is the classic miss here, because then your head comes up against the roof boarding and you can no longer see whether the underside of the joists has covered.

Arrange permission well before you book anything. A communal courtyard usually belongs to an owners' association or a housing association, and they want to know when a tower will be there, how long it stays and who is responsible for it. Ask straight away for the key or the code of the gate, because your delivery goes through there. Then hang a note at the entrance with the dates, so residents know their bike has to go. A hire period nobody has announced will founder on a rack that stays full.

The bikes themselves are your biggest obstacle. A half cleared shed does not work: you have to get along the whole wall with the tower and you want no saddles under your platform. Empty the racks completely, agree a temporary spot and keep it free until the last coat is dry. If a rack is bolted into the paving, that decides where your pitches go; walk that order through once on foot and note per spot how much room is left for the scaffold and its stabilisers.

Finally look at the surface and the way through. Slabs in a courtyard lie loose, subside at a gully and fall away towards a drain; slide a board under a wheel where you need to. Keep a strip clear where people can pass with a bike in hand, certainly if the site has only one exit. Put the bins somewhere else for those days, because they stand exactly where you want your frames. Getting a pitch firm on such slabs is covered in scaffolds on uneven ground.

An open structure costs more time than the look of it suggests. Every post has four sides, every rail has an underside, and between the mesh or the slats you get in only with a small brush. Reckon on about a day per coat for a shed of eight metres, and that includes resetting the tower every two and a half metres. Roughly speaking you are two to three times longer at it than at a closed wall of the same length.

With cleaning, sanding, a primer and a finish coat you arrive at three to four hire days. Drying time sits in there that you cannot compress, and at a bike shed it counts double: the racks stay empty until everything is hard, and residents who are missing their bike grow impatient. So plan a day extra rather than a day less, also because you cannot carry on in the dark on a shared site. An indication per kind of job is in the overview of hire days.

Planning generously works out well for your rental price. The full amount runs over the first twenty four hours, after which every following hire day counts with 95 per cent off, so the cost hardly climbs. A booking of four days therefore differs little from one of two, while you do get the calm to skip a wet morning and simply leave the scaffold standing. Set your collection day behind the day the bikes may come back, not in front of it.

Work the shed off in sections of one platform length and hold that order. Per pitch do first the underside of the roof boarding, then the rails, then the posts and last the bottom thirty centimetres where the splash back hits. That way whatever you spill lands on timber still to come. From the platform you look straight at the top of the rails, and that is exactly where the dirt sits that stays invisible from the ground.

Take small tools up with you. A one litre tin, a brush, a sanding block and a cloth are enough; with a full tray you spend your time balancing between rails. At an open shed you also paint from two sides: you do the outer face of a wall, move the tower inside and take the back of those same posts there. Count that double round in your planning, because it doubles the number of times you shift the scaffold and level it again.

Moving over paving is easy as long as the site is empty. Roll the tower to the next bay with the brakes off, check that all four castors keep contact and lock them again. Where most people are wide of the mark is the number of moves: eight metres of shed, approached from two sides, already comes to eight pitches per coat. With four coats a good part of your hire days goes into that, and it explains why such a small structure takes a whole week.

A delivery van rarely gets right into a courtyard. Count on the set being dropped in the street or at the gate and on you carrying the parts the last stretch. So measure the narrowest passage beforehand and agree where the stack may lie; a porch or a corridor residents have to use is not a good place. On the site itself you lay the frames beside the shed and not in the cycle racks, because that is where you want to get past with the scaffold.

You settle yourself when the set comes and when it goes, and that helps here because the gate has to be open. Plan the delivery for a moment when the caretaker or a resident can let you in, preferably outside the morning rush in which half the block comes for its bike. Orders that arrive on a working day before 15:00 leave the next working day, so you can still shift at short notice if the weather turns.

You put the tower together yourself; we do not come and build. A manual is in the set and there is a film showing the order of work, and at this height the building costs you only a short half hour. We come back for it afterwards, so you break it down and stack everything complete on the agreed spot. Collecting at Zeeburgerpad in Amsterdam is possible too, free and by appointment; otherwise the cost of delivery per province shows what the driving comes to.

The platform under your feet meets EN 1004, and its load class 3 stands for two hundred kilos per square metre. On this job you come nowhere near that, but do keep in mind that this is a tower for one person: let nobody climb up with you to touch in an awkward rail. Two people on a one person tower changes how it stands on loose slabs. The background to that class is in the explanation of the scaffold standard.

The fixed rules apply just as much at one and a half metres. Brakes on before you climb, nothing and nobody on the tower while it is being rolled, and off it the moment the wind gets up in earnest. That last one is less theoretical in a courtyard between two blocks than it sounds: the wind is funnelled between the elevations and pulls at an open structure. Check at every new spot that the four stabilisers are tight, and take loose sheeting or plastic off before you go up.

The real risk here is the people around you. Residents walk underneath with a bike in hand, children come to watch and somebody parks a cargo bike against a leg. So fence your working bay off with tape or cones and do not work above the walking route to the exit. Put tools behind the guard rail and not on the edge, because a pot of brushes that falls always lands awkwardly on a yard full of bikes. The rest is in the safety rules for work at height.