Painting shutters? Choose the right scaffold.

Shutters sit left and right of a window, so your working place is narrow and tall rather than wide. The RS51 with its frame of 75 cm suits that well: you drop it between the hedge and the wall, between two bay windows or onto a slim strip of garden, and it puts you exactly beside the frame. A wide build of 135 cm brings you next to nothing here, since you need no crate of material up there, only paint and hand tools.

The deck measures 245 cm, and on shutters that comes out neatly. A window of roughly a metre twenty with a shutter on each side fits inside that length, so you finish a complete opening without moving. You also have room to lay a shutter flat if you lift it off its pintles for a moment, and to put down your tin, your brushes and a roll of abrasive paper without any of it being in the way as you step sideways.

The model you settle on and the build you order are two different things. As a series the RS51 goes up to 14.2 metres of working height, yet shutters on an upper floor use only part of that reach. So pick the build that matches your own window height; which combinations exist is broken down per height in the range of mobile scaffolds for hire. That way you get precisely the build the top shutters need, without frames you never use.

Measure to the top of the highest shutter and not to the window sill. On a house from the nineteen thirties the top edge of a first floor shutter soon sits at four to five metres, and if there are shutters under the gutter as well that runs towards six. The highest shutter decides the tower you go and hire; the lower windows you then do with the same material at a lower deck setting, without ordering anything extra or swapping parts.

Working height on this job is your deck height with some 2 metres of reach on top, the distance your arms still bridge. For shutters on an upper floor that puts you in the band of six to eight metres, with the deck hung so that the top edge of the shutter sits at chest height. You would far rather paint slightly downwards, because then you see what you are doing and the gloss does not run back down your brush.

Choose a build that turns out just too low and you are reaching at every top corner, which shows in the work: streaks, missed edges and a shutter that fails along the top after a single season. What the different heights mean for the number of frames and for stability sits on the page for a working height of eight metres, useful to read before you fix a build and start working the shutters from the top down.

Windows with shutters are nearly always in the front elevation, so your build ends up on the street side, in the front garden or on a slim pavement. Look at where the wheels can rest without sinking into a border or blocking a paved path. On a terraced house that often means using a piece of the footway; call on the neighbours in that case, because on this job the tower stays there for several days and nobody enjoys looking at a build that arrived unannounced.

Flat, load bearing ground is what you need, and a front garden rarely offers it unaided. Loose slabs, a gravel strip or a sunken path you take up with firm boards under the wheels and with the adjustable spindles, until the build stands truly upright. Then swing the stabilisers out; they need room on every side, so allow for an area larger than the tower itself appears to ask. Measure that at the narrowest point of your garden before you hire.

Look as well at what stands below the spot where you will be laying gloss. Under a window with shutters there is often a water butt, a rack of bikes or a bed of perennials, and you want those covered before the first drip falls. If the build stands partly on the public highway, ask at the council. How to get a tower steady on a sunken garden slab is explained in the article on mobile scaffolds on uneven ground, including what to lay under the wheels.

Here that choice from the beginning comes back. Take the shutters off and you use the tower only to unscrew them and to hang them back later: two short sessions with several days in between in which you sand, prime and gloss at ground level. Plan it cleverly and you hire the build twice for a day, or simply keep it standing when there are many shutters and the unscrewing alone fills a morning. With six or eight of them that last option usually works out calmest.

Paint them in place and you are tied to the drying times of your gloss. Sanding and dusting off on day one, primer or first coat on day two, gloss on day three: the tower therefore stands for almost a week even though you work only a couple of hours a day. On an elevation full of shutters count on three to five rental days, and on more in autumn when the mornings stay damp. What you are hiring then is mostly waiting time, not working time.

That long hire is less painful than it sounds, because the weight of the cost sits in the first 24 hours and the days after it weigh light. On gloss work that is exactly what you want: you never have to skip a drying day to get the tower off your hands sooner, and you can redo a coat that disappoints. Put your collection date after the day the last coat goes on, so you can still check a shutter before the material leaves.

A shutter has a front, a back, a top and a bottom, and the narrow edges come on top of that. Hanging on the wall you reach at best two of those faces properly, and the underside is precisely where water stands and where the paint lets go first. If you want to do it thoroughly you lift the shutters off their pintles and paint them all round, lying flat on trestles, where the end grain and the rebate get their share as well.

Decide to leave them hanging and you work window by window from the top down, keeping an eye on the hinge. Hold each shutter with its stay or a clamp, because one that swings away halfway through a stroke leaves an instant streak across the brickwork. From a deck of 245 cm you usually manage a complete window with both shutters, after which you roll the build along and start again at the next opening in the same order.

The ironmongery is the part most people look straight past. Hinges, shutter hooks and the pintles in the wall are often thick with old paint and rust, and you would rather sand those clean than lay another coat over them. So take a screwdriver, a wire brush, some abrasive paper and a roll of tape up in one go, and mark which shutter belongs to which window, since they are rarely interchangeable. A shutter that will not go back where it came from can easily cost you an extra rental day.

You receive the tower as a set of loose parts, counted right through, and you assemble it yourself. Book on a weekday before 15:00 and the set lies at your door the following working day. Agree where it may be put down: with shutters that is often the front garden or the drive, where the pile does not sit in the way of the place you want the removed shutters on trestles. Stand them on paving and not in wet grass.

You enter both dates yourself at the reservation, the one for bringing the set and the one for taking it away. On paintwork you look at the weather across several days for that, because gloss wants dry and not too cold. Plan the delivery a day ahead of your start, so the build goes up in peace and you are sanding first thing the next morning. If rain holds the work up, the collection day moves back in consultation and the build simply stays in front of your elevation until the last coat is on.

Assembly costs you about an hour with two people and rather longer on your own, which is worth knowing before you hire a mobile scaffold for a single day of unscrewing. Once the shutters hang again and the final coat has dried you strike the build and stack the parts in the same place they lay on arrival. We collect them there on the date you gave us, so you concern yourself with finishing the shutters and never with returning anything.

Under EN 1004 a deck in load class 3 takes 200 kg for every square metre of floor. Painting shutters comes nowhere near that figure, unless you stack the ones you have removed on the deck instead of carrying them down. So do not do it: timber weighs more than it looks, and a shutter propped against the guard rail starts acting as a sail in the first decent gust. Shutters that come off go straight to the ground.

Wheels braked, stabilisers out, and you move the build only when nothing and nobody is left on it. That last part gets forgotten on paintwork now and then: a tin of gloss or a shutter that was going to come along to the next window. When it blows hard you postpone the glossing, because dust and leaves stick in a wet coat and you lose your grip on a shutter that wants to move with the wind on its hinge.

Paint makes a deck slippery, certainly once white spirit or a cleaner joins it. Wipe drips up at once and set your tin in a tray or on a hook rather than loose on the floor. On a front elevation somebody walks below you soon enough; close that strip off with tape and remember that a brush or a screwdriver from this height lands hard on the pavement or on a car that happens to be parked there.