Spray-painting a garage? Choose the right scaffold.

For spraying a detached or attached garage you hire a MiTower, the narrow 75 cm tower laid out for working on your own. That suits this job exactly: you hold the gun and nobody needs to stand beside you watching. The strip between the garage and the fence is rarely generous either, and the moment sheeting hangs against it that gap gets narrower still. Which build heights this model comes in you will find on the page about hiring a MiTower.

Width is barely missed on this deck, because with spray work almost nothing at all goes up there with you. What you need is two free hands and room to take a couple of sideways steps, and little else besides. Platform length matters far more here: 245 cm, and that puts you in front of the full width of an ordinary garage front. A wider deck would actually work against you, because the setup then pushes further onto the masked drive and lands your stabilisers on plastic.

If two of you are working on the garage, or serious repair follows the spraying, hiring a mobile scaffold is the better call: the RS51 is just as narrow at 75 cm but carries more and goes higher. That tells mostly when the garage is built against the house itself and the surface to be sprayed runs on above the first floor. The differences between the two towers are lined up in the comparison of both models.

The highest point of this job is usually the fascia above the door or the edge of the flat roof, and on an ordinary garage that sits at 2.6 to 3 metres. You reach it from a build that comes out between 4 and 6 metres working height. Working height is a different figure from the platform you stand on: add roughly 2 metres of reach to the platform height, which is how far above your head a stretched arm carries a gun.

Your zero point is the paving under the wheels, not the threshold of the garage. A drive almost always drops away a little towards the street, and those centimetres count. If the surface you are spraying runs on into the wall of the house above, take the top edge that still gets material and not the gutter of the dwelling. What a build on this scale means in practice is covered on the page about six metres of working height.

Hiring tight punishes you harder here than with brushwork. Work from a stand that is too low and you aim the top strip upwards at an angle, more material lands there than on the rest of the surface, and later you see a band in the coat. Bear in mind too that this model runs to 6.2 metres working height and no further. If your garage sits tucked under a second storey that has to be included, you hire a mobile scaffold rather than a MiTower.

Decide where the scaffold goes first and only then where the sheeting goes. Tape off the four spots where the wheels land and leave the paving there clean, so the tower stands on grip instead of on slippery plastic. Around the base the stabilisers point outwards at an angle, and at all four corners they want more room than the tower is wide. Count on a flat stretch of drive that is roomier all round than the setup itself.

The boundary asks for extra thought on this job. Sheeting will hang against the fence or over the hedge on the neighbours' side, and you still want to get past it to shift the scaffold. Agree in advance whether their car stands elsewhere for those days and whether the washing stays indoors. That sort of thing is better settled well before the scaffold is delivered than on the morning the first coat has to go on, when everything is already laid out.

Then look at what else is in the way on your drive: a downpipe on the corner, an outside tap, the bins, a drain cover that a stabiliser lands squarely on. A bike rack moves in a minute; a rocking slab is more of a nuisance. A drive that falls towards the street you take up with the levelling feet of the scaffold, never with a plank or a stack of loose slabs underneath. How that is done is explained in the piece on a scaffold on sloping ground.

The spraying itself is a matter of hours. What fills your diary is the work around it: cleaning, touching in bare patches, taping up windows and vents, running the sheeting all the way down to the ground and afterwards taking it off again without dragging fresh paint with it. For a garage that comes out at two to three days that you need the scaffold under you, even though the gun itself may only be open twice for an hour. Count the build day in.

In between sit waits you cannot make up. The first coat has to go off before the second one can follow, and wind is the biggest spoiler in this work: in a stiff breeze the material lands beside the surface and you slip a day. So plan your rental period on the certain finish rather than the optimistic one, with half a day behind it to get the sheeting and the tape off the drive.

Booking generously costs almost nothing at this rate. You pay the whole tariff over the first 24 hours only, and every day you hang behind it runs at 95 per cent off, so a spare day held back for the wind is nothing beside that first day. What the various towers and build heights cost is shown with VAT on the page with all the rates. On top of that comes the delivery and collection, a fixed amount that differs by province and that you therefore know beforehand.

An ordinary garage front is 2.5 to 3 metres wide. With a platform of 245 cm you stand in front of practically the full width, and that is exactly the gain: you work the surface off in continuous passes from top to bottom without stopping halfway. Every interruption shows up later as a start line, because a sprayed coat forgives that less than a coat laid on with a brush. For the side of the garage you move once.

That repositioning asks more care here than usual, because you are rolling across a drive that is completely covered. Fold the sheeting back onto clean paving first, roll the tower to the next spot and lay the plastic on again afterwards. Carry up everything you need there in the same trip, because climbing a slippery sheeted drive with your hands full is precisely where this job goes wrong. Lock the wheels again before you step up.

What people misjudge is the top edge, just under the overhang. When spraying you stand a little back from the surface, so the narrow space behind you is not the problem, but those last ten centimetres under the roof edge only cover properly if you are standing high enough. Before you break the setup down, walk out to the street and look up at an angle to see whether everything really is closed, because coming back means putting the whole scaffold up once more.

The scaffold reaches you as a counted package of loose parts. Do not have those dropped in the middle of the drive, because that is where your sheeting goes: along the side wall of the garage, or simply indoors, is handier. Anything ordered on a working day before 15:00 stands on your drive the next working day. You choose which day that is and when we take the tower away again, so put the delivery a day ahead of the masking.

Building it is your own work. An assembly manual comes in the box, and a video is ready that walks through the order step by step, and this tower in particular is thought out so one person gets it upright alone. That suits a job nobody else is involved in. Allow an hour the first time and do it on a drive that is still empty and clean, so before the rolls of sheeting come out.

Afterwards we collect the scaffold again, on the date you set yourself when booking. Break it down as soon as the last coat is hard enough, wipe spatter off the parts while it has not cured, and stack everything somewhere with no tape or plastic left over it. What the delivery and the collection cost together depends on the province you live in; all the amounts for that stand together on the page about delivery charges.

The deck under your feet holds 200 kg per square metre: that is load class 3, as EN 1004 describes it. Spraying a garage you get nowhere near it, since you, the gun and at most a bucket of material are all that goes up. Weight is not your worry on this job. What does count is that this tower is made for one person, and that nobody climbs up alongside for a look at how it is going.

The real risk is under your feet. Sheeting on the drive turns greasy the moment material settles on it, and the plastic creeps out from under a wheel if you are not watching. So put the wheels on the brake before you go up at all, and never shift the scaffold with someone standing on it or with things left loose on the deck. Wipe the rungs of the built in ladder dry before you climb, and lay a piece of stiff cardboard on the platform rather than a loose sheet of plastic.

Watch the wind as well, and who is walking past. If it is blowing hard, stop work: the material goes the wrong way and a light tower on an open drive catches wind itself. Keep children and visitors away from the setup while the drive lies under plastic, because nobody can make out where the stabilisers stand then. And leave no gun, no roll of tape and no tin sitting loose on the edge of the deck.