Hanging a curtain rail? Choose the right scaffold.

Indoors the Altrex RS44 is the model you reserve for this, a room scaffold that still goes in through a doorway from about 70 cm. That sounds like a detail, but on this job it makes an enormous difference: you roll it in one piece from the living room to the hall and from the hall to the study, without dismantling in between. Outdoors you would hire a mobile scaffold, but inside that leaves you with parts that fit nowhere. More about this model is at the room scaffold in our hire range.

Little has to go up on the deck for a curtain rail. A cordless drill, a masonry bit, plugs, screws, the rail brackets and a pencil is the whole list, plus the rail itself, which you usually pass up in lengths of two to three metres. That fits comfortably, even if you lay the rail at an angle over the guard rail while you make the first bracket fast. Generous work space is not the criterion here; nimbleness through a house of doors and thresholds is.

For a rail in an ordinary living room or bedroom a bigger build is actually a nuisance. You want to be able to swing it round on your own between a sofa and a dining table, and you do not want the base catching a skirting board every time. If your rail sits higher than four metres, in a void or a stairwell, the RS44 stops and another model takes over. Where the line falls is explained in the comparison of mobile and room scaffolds.

You measure on this job to the place where the rail brackets go, which for a ceiling fixing is the ceiling itself and for a wall fixing a little above the frame. In a house with plastered ceilings of three metres the RS44 gives you plenty, because this model builds a working height of 3 to 4 metres. Add about two metres of reach to your platform height and you know at once how far your hands come. The page on four metres of working height shows how that is put together.

Indoors you measure from the finished floor and not from the screed, because a thick underlay with laminate on top easily costs a few centimetres. If the room has a dais, a podium or a stair opening, your measuring point changes per window. Write the height down window by window before you book, certainly in an older house where the ceiling in the bay hangs a touch lower than in the rest of the room. A difference of ten centimetres only shows once you are up there.

Watch the distinction between what this model can do and what you enter when reserving. The RS44 goes no further than four metres of working height, so for a rail in a void or above a stairwell it is simply the wrong model. If you are only going round the rooms on the ground floor with normal ceiling heights, this room scaffold is exactly right and no heavier build is needed. Hiring more height has no use whatever indoors.

Unlike outdoors, inside there is no garden or drive where you can set something down for a moment. The build stands in the middle of a furnished room, and the spot you need is usually under the window where the sofa or the dining table happens to be. So clear a strip of a good two metres in front of the window completely, the edge of the rug included, and put the furniture on the other side of the room rather than half a metre aside.

The ground indoors is slippery instead of soft. On laminate, parquet or a poured floor the castors roll nicely, and precisely for that reason the brakes go on the moment you stand still. Lay a piece of hardboard, an old carpet or thick floor protectors under the castors and the stabilisers, because one castor with a bit of grit under it scores a parquet floor in a single movement. Underfloor heating, a floor hatch or a thin loft floor wants extra thought, since the weight lands on four small points.

Think as well about what hangs above and beside you. A ceiling light, a smoke alarm, a sloping bay corner or a pelmet limits where the build can stand. Sooner take the lamp out of its fitting than clip it while rolling past. Finally, measure the doorway to the next room before the delivery arrives, because a threshold strip or a door post that comes out slightly narrower brings your whole plan to a halt. What else interior work involves is worked out in this piece on scaffolding indoors.

The work at each window is short. Marking, drilling, making the brackets fast and clicking the rail in costs you half an hour to three quarters in an ordinary situation. What fills the day is everything around it: moving furniture, laying floor protection, rolling the build along, locking the brakes and tidying up after every window. For the four or five windows of a ground floor that adds up to one solid working day, and it is exactly why people pitch the hire period too short.

Going through the whole house adds a day. The room scaffold passes from room to room, but a staircase is another story: there you take it apart and put it together again upstairs. Count that separate half day in as it comes, along with the carrying up and down the stairs. Drilling into concrete rather than plasterboard, or an old wall where the first plug gets no grip at all, also costs time you could not possibly have foreseen beforehand.

So there is no need to be mean when you reserve. You pay the whole rate for the first twenty four hours, and on every day you tack on to that you get 95 per cent off, which makes a spare day cost almost nothing and lets you plan calmly. An extra day is welcome if you only notice after hanging that one rail still has to be shortened. To judge such a period, the overview of hire days helps you along.

What is peculiar about this job is the ratio between climbing and working. On a facade you stand an hour in the same place; here you are up a few minutes per window and then down again. So take everything up in one go and do not lay it loose on the deck, but in a small tub or a tool bag hooked over the guard rail. A plug bouncing off a wooden floor from three metres is lost among the furniture in no time.

With a long rail, fix the middle support first and work outwards from there. The rail then hangs while you shift along and you are not balancing three metres of aluminium above your head. With a ceiling fixing, mark all the drill points in one go while you are up there anyway, so you do not have to measure afresh for every hole. Over four or five windows that saves you more minutes than it sounds.

You roll on with an empty deck and a clean floor. Look before you push whether a screw or a plug is lying under a castor, because that is exactly what draws a line across a parquet floor. Never let somebody else shift the build while you are still up there, not even over two metres. If you are painting the ceiling in the same round, plan it as a separate pass with the rails not yet in.

The room scaffold is supplied as a counted set of loose parts, complete and ready to be carried inside. Work out in advance where that stack may lie: a corridor, the hall or an empty corner of the room where you start. Leaving it outdoors is seldom clever for interior work, certainly if it rains and you then carry the parts over your own floor. Anything confirmed before 15:00 on a working day is on your doorstep the next working day.

You choose yourself which day the delivery happens and when we come to fetch it again. With interior work the weather hardly matters, so you mostly plan around the day the curtains arrive or the floor fitter finishes. Building is your work, with the paper manual supplied and the video beside it; for this model two people are comfortably done inside an hour. The right order runs through step by step in the assembly instructions.

Once every rail hangs, you strike the room scaffold and put the parts together somewhere we can get at them. Carry them out in two trips rather than dragging a whole frame down the narrow corridor. Bringing and fetching together carry a fixed amount per province including VAT, and the rate matching your address is listed with the costs of delivery and collection. Collecting it yourself is possible too, provided your transport takes the parts.

EN 1004 applies indoors just as much: your platform sits in load class 3, which stands for 200 kg on each square metre. With curtain rails you come nowhere near it, since you plus a drill and an aluminium rail amount to very little on that score. The real point is a different one: because you are up only briefly, people are tempted to leave the stabilisers folded in. Fold them out anyway. What the standard covers is in the note on the load classes.

On a smooth indoor floor the brake matters more than it does outside on grass. Four castors on laminate roll away at the slightest sideways shove, and you give that shove yourself the moment you press a drill against the ceiling. So lock every castor before you step on, check them again after each move, and never roll the build along while somebody or some tool is on it. Shifting even two metres counts fully as moving.

The risk belonging to this job is standing beneath you: furniture, a glass coffee table, a television. A falling drill does more damage there than to the floor itself. Cover what you have not pushed aside, and keep pets and small children out of the room for as long as you are up. If you are drilling into a ceiling, allow for services in it and for dust dropping into your eyes. The general rules are gathered under working at height.