Painting high walls? Choose the right scaffold.

Indoors your limit is not the height but the door frame. For emulsion work you therefore hire the Altrex RS44, a room scaffold that goes through an interior door from roughly 70 cm in parts and reaches 3 to 4 metres inside the house. That is exactly the band a raised ceiling, a stairwell or a void falls into. An outdoor frame on four swivel castors will simply not enter that room. More about this type is on the page about room scaffold hire.

The deck itself matters more here than on most indoor jobs. On the platform there is a bucket of emulsion, a spare roller lying down and a wet brush hanging for the angles, and you still have to move around all of it without kicking anything over. A deck length of 245 cm gives you that room, and it is also the width of wall you can finish per set up without losing your wet edge. Broader than that the deck need not be.

A larger mobile scaffold makes little sense inside. It will not pass down the hall, it will not turn the corner at the stairs, and the extra working height goes unused because your ceiling is fixed. Only where a void runs deeper than four metres does this model fall short and you have to look further. Stay under four metres and this room scaffold is the obvious pick. What is and is not possible indoors is set out in the guidance on towers inside the house.

On emulsion work you measure to the seam where the wall meets the ceiling, because that corner has to be cut in with a brush. In a raised living room that sits around three metres; alongside a void it climbs to four. When you book working height with a hire firm, we mean your platform height plus the good two metres you still bridge with a lifted arm. What a low build gives you is shown at four metres of working height.

Measure from the finished floor the scaffold will stand on, and mind the stairs. Beside a void part of the frame sometimes sits on a half landing or right next to an open stairwell, so your starting level is higher or lower than in the rest of the room. Look too for a beam, a downlight or a duct sticking out, because your build will meet an obstacle like that sooner than it meets the ceiling. Measure that point separately.

Choose too low and you paint the top strip with your arm fully stretched. The coat goes thin and uneven, and on a big wall you see that transition come back as a band once it dries. You also lose your wet edge while climbing off the steps to fetch something. Hiring roomier costs you only a little extra build time indoors. For a wall carrying on over more than one storey, look instead at a wall up to first floor level.

A high wall is seldom entirely clear. There is a radiator beneath it, a stair rail running past, or the void begins half a metre beyond the edge of the floor. So establish first where the four feet come down and whether they all rest on the same solid surface. A leg half on a stair tread or on the lip of a landing is not a pitch you want to climb with a full bucket, however short the job.

Inside, the castors and stabilisers are your biggest risk of damage. Parquet, poured floors and vinyl do not care for point loads, and emulsion splashes soak into the joint between two boards. So lay hardboard or a stout sheet down first over the entire strip you will travel that day, and only then set the scaffold on it. That way you need not drag the dust sheet out from under the wheels each time you shunt a band along, and your floor survives.

Clear the room out beyond the last band you intend to do that day. A sofa that still has to be moved halfway through costs you time at precisely the wrong moment, namely while a wet edge is waiting on you. Think about what is on the wall itself as well: switches, a thermostat, picture hooks and the fixings of a curtain track are better off removed before the hired scaffold stands in front of them.

On this job count in coats rather than in walls. A high wall takes two coats of emulsion as a rule, and between those two the first has to be through before you can go over it again. Which means leaving the scaffold standing overnight where it stands. Add the preparation to that, because masking skirtings, filling holes and cutting in the top edge all happen from the pitch as well. Two to three rental days is a realistic period for a void.

What stretches the planning indoors is the climate in the house. A cold, damp room lets emulsion cure more slowly than the tin promises, and painting on over a coat that still tacks always makes more work than waiting does. Open a window in the morning and ventilate, but do not put a heater straight onto the wall. And bear in mind that the room will be out of use for the household throughout those days.

Holding on longer is not an expensive choice with this hire. The first twenty four hours form the weight of the bill and on everything after that 95 per cent comes off the day rate. Book too tightly and you are waiting beside a half painted wall for the van to arrive, which is exactly the moment that last coat was still due. How the rental price is put together can be checked on the page with our tariffs before you lock in your dates.

Divide the wall before you start into bands that match the 245 cm your deck is long. From one pitch you do the upper strip over that full length, cutting in along the ceiling and into the corner as you go. Work away from where the light falls, so you can see for yourself how far you have got. The lower half of those same bands you then roll in from floor level, with the same roller and out of the same bucket.

Shunting along belongs to the rhythm of your wet edge. Do not roll the last band of a pitch right out to its edge, but leave a hand's width still wet for when you move the scaffold. Set the bucket on the floor before you release the castors, move, put the brakes back on, and only then pick that edge up again. The transition between two pitches then stays invisible, even when you look along it later under raking light.

What you need up top you carry up in one trip: the bucket, a roller on a short handle, a brush for the junctions and a clean cloth for splashes. A long pole works against you inside, because you catch the lamp or the ceiling with it. People underestimate how often they end up descending: on a wall of eight metres wide that already comes to three separate pitches per coat, so six of them across two coats.

The set arrives at your door in loose, counted parts and not as a whole. For indoor work that is a blessing, because it lets you carry it piece by piece down the hall to the room being painted. Do not put the parts down in that room itself, but in the hall or in an adjoining space. Anyone reserving before 15:00 on a working day has the complete set indoors one working day later.

The date on which delivery happens and the day we take it back again are yours to mark. For emulsion work you would rather have it brought a day ahead of your first coat, so you can build and mask in peace. Assembly is something you do by hand, guided by the manual supplied and the instruction footage. In a cleared room two of you are busy with that for about an hour, ladder and guard rails included.

Once the painting is finished and dry you strike the room scaffold, carry the parts back to the hall, and we load it into the van on the agreed day. Wait until the emulsion is hard before you start stripping down, or you will drag fresh paint past the door frames into the passage. Count the parts as you dismantle so nothing stays behind in the room. What the return trip comes to differs from one province to the next, and you can read that figure back under the charge for delivery and collection.

Carrying capacity: 200 kg on every square metre of deck, called load class 3 in the standard EN 1004. On emulsion work that sounds like far too much, until you add up what is really up there: you, a second person cutting in the corners, a full bucket, a spare tray and a box of tools you would rather not keep carrying down. What such a class allows in practice is set out in the piece on loading and weight.

The ordinary conditions apply indoors as well. Brake the castors before you go up the ladder, never move it with a person or a bucket on the platform, and always climb up through the inside rather than round the outside. That last one is a genuine temptation inside, because the distance down to the floor looks so small from up there. After each move check that all four stabilisers stand firmly again on the protected floor before you climb.

The hazard that goes with this work is slipperiness. Emulsion dripping off the roller onto the deck boards makes a patch where your shoe finds no grip, and you notice it only as you step backwards. Put a piece of card under the bucket and wipe splashes away at once. Keep the space directly below you free of household and pets too, especially with a bucket standing near the edge. The full list of requirements sits under the rules for work at height.