Hanging a clock? Choose the right scaffold.

For indoor work at this height you hire the Altrex RS44 room scaffold. The model was thought out for rooms and corridors: the parts are short, the base is compact and the whole thing passes an interior doorway from roughly 70 cm wide. That is exactly what you need when the clock is going up in the hall or on the landing, because a build meant for outdoor work simply will not come inside. The sizes that belong with it are set out on the page about room scaffolds you can hire.

Working on a facade you would hire a mobile scaffold, but on this job it is of no use. Such models are heavier, the uprights longer, and you will not get them round the turn of a stairwell. With a clock it is not about deck area anyway. You drag no tub along, no bucket and no roll of material, only a drill, a handful of plugs, a level and the movement itself. All of that fits beside you on the deck, even with two people up there.

The platform length of 245 cm does help you here. A large wall clock you lay down full length while you adjust the hanging bracket, and you do not want to do that on the ground where it knocks against a skirting or disappears under a chair leg. If the clock has two fixing points forty centimetres apart, you reach both at that length without stepping off. More build than this you need not hire for a single point on a wall.

Measure not to the middle of the dial but to the hook or bracket behind it, because that is where your bit goes in. In a hall that point often sits between 2.5 and 3.5 metres, and a reach of 3 to 4 metres lands you exactly right. Behind that figure is a simple sum: to the height of the platform you add roughly 2 metres of reach, so the deck stays well below the clock and you work at chest height instead of above your head.

Your zero point is at the castors and not at the clock, so reckon from the floor the build will rest on. If the wall looks out over a void, or the room scaffold stands on the raised part of a split level hall, that starting point moves half a metre just like that. When the clock goes above a door frame, hold a tape against a straight batten instead of guessing by eye. What a reach of four metres gives you in build terms is worked out per model.

Choosing too tight you notice at once in your shoulders. Drill with your arms stretched and the grit falls into your sleeve, you lose sight of the pencilled cross and the hole runs off line. A clock hanging half a degree out of true is obvious from the sofa, and then you may drill a second hole in a wall you were trying to spare. So take the build that comes out a step higher rather than the one that just fails to reach and leaves you stretching.

The place where the build ends up is rarely an empty floor on this job. In a hall there is a coat rack, a shoe rack and sometimes a radiator right under the wall where the clock has to go, and in a living room it is a sideboard or the arm of the sofa. Clear that strip completely before the parts come in, because assembling between furniture costs you more time than the building itself. Reckon on three square metres you genuinely keep free, walking route included.

Fold the stabilisers out indoors as a matter of course. They stick out at an angle and that is just the space a door swings into or where the bottom stair tread begins, so walk it through before you go up. Watch the surface as well. Parquet, laminate and tiles lie dead level and that works pleasantly, but the threshold between corridor and room does not. Never roll an erected room scaffold over such a ridge; lift it or strike it and set it down afresh.

On this job the castors stay in the same spot for a long time, and on a soft wooden floor that leaves a dent you will never get out again. So put four pieces of hardboard or thick cardboard under them before you roll it into position. That same cardboard later catches the drill dust drifting down the wall, which saves you half an hour with the vacuum. What else indoor work involves is set out in the piece on using scaffolds inside.

The hanging itself is short. Marking up, drilling, plug in, bracket fast and the clock on it comes to an hour all told, perhaps two if the wall is old brickwork and your bit refuses to go through. The time sits in the edges around it: emptying the room, putting the build together, striking it again and cleaning the floor. Together that is half a day of work, so a single hire day is ample for a clock in one fixed place.

Even so most people reserve two, and that is not strange. If the delivery falls in the afternoon you build calmly that day and hang the clock next morning, rested and without rushing. There is always the chance besides that a plug takes no grip in a hollow wall, that the supplied bracket turns out not to suit the movement, or that the DIY shop has already shut. With a day of slack that becomes a small detour instead of a problem.

That extra day hardly shows in your rental price either. You pay the full rate only over the opening period of 24 hours; every hire day you tack on behind it comes with 95 per cent off. Planning roomily therefore costs you next to nothing, while a booking cut too fine means the van arrives while your drill is still up on the deck. Hanging several clocks, frames and a mirror, simply add half a day per room.

Take everything up in one go, because every forgotten plug means climbing down. The list is short: a drill and the masonry bit that suits the wall, plugs and screws, a screwdriver, a pencil, the level and the clock itself. Lay the tools on the guard rail side and the movement in the middle of the deck, so you do not step over it while walking backwards to look. A small tub for the plugs saves you hunting among the grit that ends up everywhere.

Lining up is where nearly everybody comes unstuck. Close to, up on the deck, such a clock always hangs straight, and only from below do you see it leaning three millimetres. So reckon on going up and down two or three times, and mark the second and third drill position while you are standing up there instead of shuffling below with the clock in your hands. Draw a pencil line along the top edge of the bracket before you loosen anything.

Moving along is almost never needed here. Once the clock hangs you shift a metre sideways at most, to tuck away a cable trunking or the flex of a mains movement. Do that with an empty deck: take off the clock and the tools, release the brakes, roll gently across and lock it again. If you want to hang a pendant light from the ceiling in the same build, put it in the diary for the same day.

The room scaffold reaches you in bundles of loose parts, complete and ticked off against the consignment note. The cut-off is 15:00: order by then on a working day and the set is loaded for the next. Agree in advance where the driver is to set those bundles down: sooner the garage, the utility room or just inside the front door than in the middle of the hallway, because there you walk round them all day while you are emptying the room.

The building you do yourself, and with this model that is no hardship. The instruction video shows in which order the frames, the braces and the deck go in, and with two of you you are standing up high within half an hour. We do not come to build and we never deliver a scaffold erected, so count that half hour into the plan for your day. Think ahead to the end as well: striking goes faster than building, but it wants an empty floor and somewhere to stack.

You pick your delivery date and your collection date yourself when you reserve. For a clock the handiest combination is a delivery late in the afternoon with a collection a day later, which leaves the whole morning in between entirely free for the work upstairs. Afterwards we come for the parts; you set them out struck and bundled. What that transport adds differs by province and is set out in the overview of delivery charges.

Every square metre of the deck takes 200 kg, the figure load class 3 sets out within EN 1004. With a clock you never come near that limit, not even with somebody standing beside you to direct. What counts here is the way that weight moves: the moment you hang a five kilo movement on the hook with your arms stretched out, your centre of gravity travels towards the guard rail. So keep both feet inside the deck and do not reach over the edge.

Lock all four castors for as long as anybody is up there, even for a ten minute job. You never move a build while somebody is standing on it or while the clock and the tools are still up, however short the distance. Indoors wind plays no part, but a smooth tiled floor does, because cardboard that has grown damp slides out from under a castor easily. The full set of rules on guard rails and fall protection is worth reading before you build.

The danger belonging to this job plays out below you. A drill sliding off the deck lands on tiles or parquet, and in a hall the rest of the household walks past there without thinking. So pull the door to the corridor shut, keep children and pets out of the room and lay tools against the guard rail rather than near the edge. Switch off the circuit as well before you drill into a wall that may have services behind it.