Staining a wooden facade? Choose the right scaffold.

For an elevation clad entirely in timber the RS52 from Altrex comes first, the version measuring 135 cm across. Going wide rests on a practical argument here, not a comfortable one. You are on it for days at a stretch, your stock sits up there with you, and usually somebody else works the same face alongside you. Edging past one another on a cramped deck tells over this many square metres. In the hire range of mobile towers the versions stand side by side.

More goes up with you on this job than on a single window frame: a bucket of stain, a separate tin for the end grain, two brushes, a stirring stick, abrasive paper and a cloth for the runs that creep down the boards. With 135 cm underfoot you set that bucket down beside you and still walk past it. That saves you two or three climbs at every position, and over a complete elevation those climbs run into dozens.

If the route to the boarding is decided by a gate of eighty centimetres or an alley between two houses, you end up on the RS51 at 75 cm instead. Measure that run before you reserve, because the loose parts have to travel through it too. A room scaffold for indoor work or a one person MiTower is no answer to this job: those reach roughly four and six metres, and cladding across three storeys sits far above them. Otherwise compare the dimensions of the different mobile scaffolds.

The highest point of this job is rarely the gutter. Timber cladding usually carries on into the gable or runs tight up under the fascia, and that top row takes just as much stain as the bottom one. Measure, then, to the last board your brush has to touch. On a house of three storeys that lands you between 8 and 12 metres. The arithmetic behind that is short: to the height at which your platform hangs you add roughly two metres of reach from outstretched arms.

Your starting point is the spot where the wheels come to rest, not your doorstep. At many houses the ground falls away towards the street, or the back garden sits half a metre below the terrace. That half metre is precisely what decides whether one build is enough or whether a section has to go on. Where the gable comes to a steep point, measure to the apex and not to the edge of the roof slope, because two metres hide in that difference. Write your figure down before you book.

Hiring too tight only shows up once the stain has dried. Come up just short at the top row and you do that later from another position, leaving a horizontal set-off halfway along a board. On dark stained timber that line never really goes away. A roomier build costs comparatively little; a second round of assembly costs a day. Which build suits an elevation of this height is set out at working on the second floor.

Unlike a repair at one point, here you travel the whole elevation with the tower. The strip it rolls over must be flat and clear along its full length, not only at the front door. Walk it before you order and note where it pinches: a border with a raised edge, a water butt at the downpipe, a cellar hatch, a row of bicycles or a terrace that sits a slab higher. Whatever you clear now you will not be dragging aside between two positions later.

The higher you build, the further the stabilisers splay outwards. Towards 12 metres that is no modest triangle any more but a solid piece of ground on all four sides, on top of the footprint of the tower itself. Reckon on a wider strip than you would guess by eye and make sure the ends do not finish up in the planting. Setting them out and locking them off is covered at length in the piece on stabilising and tying in.

Where the elevation faces the street, ask beforehand what your council allows on a stretch of pavement or a parking bay. This is not an afternoon but a whole week, so you hold that spot for a run of days. The same courtesy applies to the neighbours once the tower rolls along the boundary. Finally, sheet the border or terrace under your working face, because stain that creeps down the boards ends up there and soaks into the slabs.

On a complete timber elevation, reckon that the scaffold stands with you for five to eight days. The staining itself moves along nicely, since a broad brush lays off large areas in the length of the board. The days disappear into everything around it: washing the boarding down, sanding back the weathered patches, treating the end grain separately and then going over those same metres a second time. If the cladding carries on round the corner as well, add two days before you fix a date.

There are pauses in this you cannot shorten by any means. The timber has to be dry through before the first coat goes on, and after that the stain has to pull away before the second follows. A shower in the night means you do not start at eight the next morning, and on a face in full sun the stain pulls in so fast that you are better off moving to the shaded side. So the forecast sets your order of work, not your own diary.

The tariff makes generous planning cheap. Only that opening twenty four hour period is billed at the whole rate; on each further day 95 per cent comes off that figure, so a couple of days of slack scarcely move your rental price. Set your end date well past the day you think the last coat will be on, not exactly on it, because that coat rarely lands when you planned. How others judge a period like this is described in this piece on the length of your hire.

At each position you take on a vertical bay exactly as wide as your deck is long: 245 cm. With stain you work that bay most easily from top to bottom, hanging the platform a level lower each time instead of rolling the tower on. The wet edge then sits at the side of the bay and not halfway along a board. Only when the bay is done from apex to plinth do you move along to the next position on the face.

That makes the number of positions easy to predict in advance. A wall nine metres wide asks for four of them, and because two coats have to go on you walk that route twice. If the side elevation is boarded as well, the count very nearly doubles. Take up what you need in one go, because going back for a forgotten stirring stick costs more minutes at this height than you allow for. A short list left on the deck saves pointless trips.

What people misjudge are the edges and the junctions. End grain, the seam at a corner profile and the timber tucked under the overhang all drink far more than the flat boards between them and want separate attention with a smaller brush. The same goes for the bottom row just above ground level, which has caught the most moisture over the years. Walk the elevation before delivery takes place and write those spots down, so you know in advance where the extra hours are going to go.

The mobile scaffold arrives as a complete, countable set of loose parts. Settle in advance where that stack lands, and do not pick the grass or the terrace directly under the boarding: that is where you want to roll, and that is where the drips from your brush come down. A driveway or the far end of the front garden works better, particularly if your van or trailer fits there too. Book on a working day and settle it before 15:00, and the whole set stands at your door the next working day.

You choose the morning the set turns up and the day it goes back, and on a staining job you obviously do that with the forecast beside you. Have it arrive on the eve of a dry spell, then you build on the first morning and use the afternoon to wash down and sand. Erecting it falls to you, with the manual and the instruction film propped up beside the parts; for a tower of this height two people should allow half a day.

When you are done we come back to take everything away again. Your part is to dismantle and lay the parts out complete, preferably on a morning that stays dry, because wet aluminium is awkward to stack. Count them as you take the tower apart and you will not be hunting a stray brace at the van. What is added per province for bringing and fetching is listed with VAT included under the cost of delivery.

The deck under your boots is rated at two hundred kilos for every square metre: load class 3, the banding EN 1004 gives these towers. That figure counts for more on this job than it looks. Two painters side by side, each with a full bucket, a bag of tools and a pack of abrasive paper, sit closer to the limit than brushwork suggests. Spread the weight along the length of the deck rather than stacking it all by the hatch and leaving it there together.

The fixed rules weigh heavier at ten metres than they do just off the ground. Brake the wheels the moment anybody climbs, never roll the tower with a person or material on it, and stop work once it begins to blow hard. You feel a gust up there long before you feel it on the terrace, and an open tin of stain in your hand is the worst moment for it. Check all four stabilisers again after every move.

The hazard that really belongs to this product is slipperiness. Stain is thin and drips easily, and a handful of spots make an aluminium deck treacherous. Lay something over it that you can replace once it starts to shine, and wipe up spills straight away. Keep the zone under the tower empty as well, because a brush or a tin falling from this height lands hard. The remaining rules are gathered in this overview of rules for work at height.