Maintaining woodwork? Choose the right scaffold.

On a maintenance round you make a circuit of your house, and that makes weight and width count for more than deck area. The RS51 of 75 cm is the practical answer here: it clears a side gate, fits a path between two houses and you push it from one frame to the next on your own. In a day you shift it ten times or more, and then every centimetre you do not have to steer counts. The models are listed with their sizes in the overview for hiring a mobile scaffold.

What you carry up on this job is limited, and it sits comfortably on a narrow deck. A sealant gun with a few cartridges, a knife to cut the old bead away, abrasive paper, a cloth, a small tin of varnish with a brush, a handful of screws and a screwdriver for hinges that have started to drop. On a platform of 245 cm you stand that in a box at one end and keep the rest free to stand and move in.

Working with two of you, or stripping larger sections back before you finish them, the wider RS52 of 135 cm gives more room to move. Where your highest element sits under six metres and you do the round alone, the one person MiTower of 75 cm is a lighter option, good for 4.2 to 6.2 metres. For the inside of those same frames you take a room scaffold, which passes an inside door from about 70 cm. More differences are set out in the comparison between these two towers.

On a round past all your exterior timber it is not the element you begin with that fixes the build, but the element that sits highest. Almost always those are the fascia boards or the bargeboards along the roof edge, and not the frames on the upper floor. So measure upwards first and only then to the rest. On a house of two storeys you land between 6 and 8 metres. Behind that figure lies a simple addition: your deck height plus the two metres or so your arms add.

Take your measurement from the ground your wheels will rest on, and remember that on a round this ground differs from side to side. At the street you are on the pavement, in the back garden often half a slab lower, and behind the shed sometimes a step below that again. Take the highest of those situations as your starting point for the build you hire, because you take one tower for the whole round and not a different one per elevation.

Choose too low and you skip precisely the elements the scaffold was ordered for. Fascia boards and the top edge of a dormer stay untouched, and that is exactly the timber that goes downhill fastest, because it gets wet in every shower and rarely sees the sun. Redoing half a round means a second reservation, another assembly day and a van coming out once more. Which build gives which reach is set out clearly at a reach of 8 metres working height.

A maintenance round gains enormously from preparation. Walk round your house and number the stand positions: front elevation left and right, the side by the store room door, the rear by the garden doors, and the spot under the dormer. Note per position which elements you take there. That tells you in advance how many times you have to move, and on this job that number is the best predictor of your hire period. Keep the list, because in a few years you do the identical round again.

Every stand position has its own ground. In front of the door there are slabs, along the side often gravel or grit, and at the back grass that gives after a wet week. On the soft spots you slide a plate or a paving slab under each wheel and set the four stabilisers with care. Bear in mind too that gravel steers worse than slabs, certainly with a full bag on the rail. Where your garden falls towards a ditch, see how to handle it in the piece about a surface that is not level.

While setting out your route, watch for the places you simply cannot reach. Fascia boards above an extension, a shutter above the shed roof or a frame behind a grown out hedge ask for a different approach from the rest. Look at the practical side as well: with the tower a day in front of the door, visitors walk around it, and on the drive it means the car stands elsewhere. You would rather know those things before the delivery than after.

For an ordinary house with frames on two floors, a pair of shutters and fascia boards all round, you come out at three to five hire days. Per element you are twenty to forty five minutes checking, cutting, sanding and touching in, and moving the tower comes on top of that each time. It is those moves that eat your day, not the work on the timber itself. Count your stand positions, multiply by the elements at each, and you have a realistic estimate.

There are waiting moments in it you cannot plan away. Fresh sealant needs time before you can paint over it, and a touched in spot has to be dry before the second coat goes on. In autumn the dew comes on top of that: in the morning the timber is damp and by four o'clock it is damp again. That makes your workable window shorter than the day is long, and it translates directly into more hire days than the number of hours suggests.

Booking generously is cheaply arranged on this job. Only the first twenty four hours are charged whole; every day you tack on after that costs 95 per cent less. A margin of a day or two for a shower that lands badly therefore barely shows in your rental price, while booking tight forces you to rush the last elevation or skip it. Put the collection date a day behind your final stand position. How to judge such a stretch for a round is explained in the article on the number of hire days.

A deck of 245 cm covers a complete frame plus a length of fascia board above it at most houses. That lets you combine two elements per stand position: the window on the upper floor and the roof edge lying exactly above it. On a maintenance round that is precisely the gain you are after, because every element you take from a position already standing saves you a move and therefore time inside your hire period. So look up at each spot before you drop down.

Carry your things in a bucket or a bag with a handle, so you can climb with one hand. On this job you go up and down more often than on any other, and that is just when the temptation is greatest to carry something loose. Up top, put everything in the same place, so after the umpteenth move you still reach for it blind. Loose cartridges and knives belong in that bag and not somewhere beside your feet on the platform.

What nearly everybody misjudges is how much the round turns up. Once you are at eye level with the timber you spot a split joint in a fascia board, a bottom sill that has drawn moisture and a hinge hanging crooked. Count on discovering one or two jobs per elevation that you would never have noticed from ground level. Build a generous margin into your hire days, or the round turns into a rush halfway and the back of the house waits until next time.

The mobile scaffold is delivered as a complete set of loose, counted components. Pick a place for it central to your route, on the drive or beside the front door for instance, because you build once and roll after that. Do not lay the stack on the spot you had in mind as your first stand position on day one. Anyone who has the order finished on a weekday with time to spare before 15:00 sees the complete set arrive the next working day.

You name the arrival day and the departure day of the set yourself. For maintenance you would rather put that in late spring or early autumn, when the timber is dry and the days are still long enough to let a coat of varnish dry. Erecting it is your task; keeping the manual and the film beside you helps with that. For an RS51 to eight metres two people are busy about two hours, stabilisers included.

After your last stand position we come to fetch the tower. Dismantling and laying the parts ready is down to you, preferably on the same spot where they were delivered. Count them as you take it apart and no brace or coupler goes missing in the grass behind the shed, which always causes a search on collection day. The rate for bringing and fetching depends on your province and is listed with VAT at the cost of delivery.

Every deck in our hire fleet holds two hundred kilos per square metre, exactly what load class 3 prescribes within the EN 1004 standard. On a maintenance round you rarely come near it, because you take little up with you. The point here is a different one: precisely because it is light, you are tempted to leave things lying loose on the deck while you already want the tower a stand position further on. That is exactly the moment it goes wrong.

You move it empty and with nobody on board, however short the distance. On this job you roll often, so that rule comes back ten times a day and is therefore ten times a day tempting to skip. Brake the wheels again the moment you climb, fold all four stabilisers out afresh and stop work the moment it really begins to blow. An autumn squall with gusts is no time to be finishing a fascia board.

Watch as well what is happening below you. On a round you regularly stand above a front door, a terrace or a garden path where household and visitors pass. A knife or a cartridge that falls lands there. Close that zone off with a bucket or a wheelbarrow, or plan the stand position at the entrance for a time when nobody is going in and out. Warn the household before you start on that side. Every further requirement is gathered in the overview of rules that apply at height.