Repairing wood rot? Choose the right scaffold.

Decayed timber rarely sits in a convenient row. One spot is in a window sill on the street side, the next in a fascia board above the garden doors, the third in a frame post behind the shed. Because the tower has to visit all of them, the RS51 at 75 cm is the sensible pick: narrow enough to clear a side gate, light enough to push on your own and short enough to steer round a corner. The mobile scaffolds you can hire are listed there with their dimensions.

On the 245 cm platform you lay out considerably more for this work than for painting. A multi tool or router bit, a chisel, a screwdriver to probe with, wood hardener, two part filler, a couple of filling knives, a sanding block and sometimes a small saw with a clamp for an insert. You set that out lengthways beside you instead of around your feet, and a deck of 75 cm is ample for it. Wider becomes awkward here rather than useful, since it still has to pass the gate.

If you are replacing a complete section of frame, or somebody is fitting long inserts alongside you, the wider RS52 at 135 cm comes into view for the extra elbow room. Where the rot is indoors instead, say in a window board on the stairwell, the room scaffold is the logical answer: it passes an interior doorway from roughly 70 cm and gets you three to four metres up. The difference between those two routes is set out in the comparison of both types.

Find the highest damage point first, because that fixes your build and not the point you would rather start on. Usually it is a fascia board along the roof edge or a window corner in a dormer, and seldom the ground floor frame you noticed first. On a house with two storeys that brings you out at 6 to 8 metres. The sum behind it is short: to the height at which your deck comes to hang, add roughly two metres for the reach of your arms.

Start your tape at the wheels and not at your doorstep, because on this job you are by no means always standing on the pavement. Often the tower goes in a border, on a garden path or on a terrace lower than the front of the house. Allow a little margin as well, for a reason peculiar to rot: the decay seldom stops exactly where the discolouration does. What looks from below like a patch in a sill regularly turns out at close quarters to run on into the post above.

Choose too tight and you stand with the cutter just under the edge where the timber goes soft, unable to finish the repair properly. You do not leave half routed timber open for a week with rain in prospect, so a second build or a fresh booking follows anyway, and both cost you days. One section more is by far the cheapest answer. What a build to 8 metres of working height actually reaches is set out there.

Walk right round the house before you reserve and put every decayed point on a sketch. The tower has to be able to stand under each of them, and on repair work that is the awkward condition. A sill above an extension or a conservatory cannot be reached from ground level, nor can a fascia board above a shed roof. Meet points like that and your whole approach changes, sometimes the model too, so you want to know before the delivery slot is booked and the van is loaded.

Under every point you need flat ground plus the triangle the four stabilisers take up around it. At a repair in a back garden that often means a border or a planter moving aside, because you stay in the same place for hours rather than shuffling on. Where the ground falls away, or the grass gives after a shower, put boards or paving slabs under the wheels. How to solve that tidily is covered in the article on uneven ground.

Reckon as well on staying in one place far longer than you would when painting. Stand a point above the drive and the car cannot leave that day. Sit a point above the path to the back door and the whole household walks round it. Think too of the downpipe on the corner and a low hedge right under a frame: those are exactly the places where the foot of the tower will not come close enough.

Count your damage points and your planning is nearly done. For four to six spots across two storeys, three to five hire days is normal. A small patch in a sill takes an hour, but a rotten bottom rail needing an insert soon costs half a day, cutting out, fitting, gluing and clamping included. So do not spread the points evenly over your days: there are always one or two that swallow more time on their own than all the rest together.

The waiting sits in the curing. Wood hardener has to soak in before you fill, filler has to go off before you can sand it, and only then can the primer follow. On a cold or damp day that takes noticeably longer than the tin suggests, and on wet timber you do not start at all, however keen you are to push on. Those hours tick by while the tower simply stays under the point, and that is what stretches a hire period beyond the working hours in it.

Happily a day of overrun barely shows in what you pay, which is good news on this job. The full amount covers the first twenty four hours only; and from the second day onward 95 per cent is taken off that rate. A day of margin for a spot that opens up bigger than expected costs almost nothing, while hiring too tight leaves you with a half finished repair in the rain and a second transport. How other customers gauge such a stretch is set out in this piece on your hire period.

With a deck of 245 cm you stand wide enough at an average frame to reach the whole bottom sill plus both corners without rolling on. Where two damage points sit close together, in two windows side by side for instance, you often take them in one set-up. That tells straight away in your hire period, because every move means stabilisers in, wheels released, tower shifted, levelled again and everything locked off before you can carry on.

Take up everything you think you will need in one go. Forgetting something matters more here than in painting: once your filler is mixed you have a limited number of minutes, and that is no moment to go down for a knife or a sanding block. Lay your things out in the order you use them, with the mixed filler on a piece of card rather than sitting loose on the deck of the tower.

What people misjudge is the size of each point taken on its own. As soon as you begin cutting, soft timber almost always runs further than the discolouration outside suggested. Count on finding one or two extra points from the tower that you never saw from below, at the top of a sill perhaps, or behind a layer of paint that is lifting. Allow for that in your number of set-ups and in your hire days.

We drop the mobile scaffold with you as a complete, countable set of loose parts. Pick somewhere the stack can sit undisturbed for several days, because on this job you do not rebuild each time: you roll the same tower from point to point. A corner of the drive will do, or a strip along the fence. Orders placed on a working day and settled before 15:00 are on your street the following working day.

When the set turns up and when we take it away again you state at the time of booking. Let it come the day before you start, so you can build without haste and get straight on to probing for timber that feels soft. Putting it up is your own job, manual and instruction film propped where you can see them; an RS51 to eight metres stands within about two hours if there are two of you. A dry day helps, because filling a damp frame is pointless.

At the end we come back for the parts. You take the tower down and lay the components ready complete, somewhere the driver can reach them. Do that only once your last repair has cured and been sanded, or a day later you will be back at that same frame with a bucket on a ladder. What the transport costs depends on the province you live in; those amounts are listed with VAT at the charges for delivery, so you can budget for them beforehand.

Two hundred kilos per square metre may rest on the deck of your tower, which is the load class 3 figure laid down in EN 1004. On repair work the weight usually sits not in the things themselves but in how they are spread: tools, tins and a set of clamps all like to end up on the same square metre beside your feet. Spread them along the length of the platform and put the heavier items towards the hatch rather than piled at one end.

The basic rules apply here in full, and none of them bends for a small job. Lock the wheels the moment anybody goes up, never shift the tower with tools or a person aboard, and stop working when it starts to blow properly. That last happens more often than you would think, because many people only start in autumn, when the damage has become visible after a wet spell. Fold all four stabilisers out again after every move and check them.

What really counts with rot is everything that comes down. Routed out lumps, old paint flakes, nails and sometimes a whole length of sill drop straight under your working spot. Keep that zone clear, certainly where children play or a path runs beneath. Wear safety glasses against dust and splinters too, because a spinning cutter at eye level behaves quite differently from a sanding block in your hand. The rest of the rules are in this overview of requirements for work at height.