Painting walls? Choose the right scaffold.

Indoors you work with the Altrex RS44 room scaffold, a build whose working height stops at 3 to 4 metres and which exists for interior jobs and nothing else. The base passes an interior door of around 70 cm, so you wheel it from the hall into the sitting room in one piece without unbolting anything first. That saves half an hour a room. What else stands ready for inside jobs is listed among the room scaffolds available to hire.

For painting walls what matters most is being able to stand with your hip against the guard rail while you cut in. One hand is then free for the brush and one holds the kettle, and you sidestep along the ceiling line without shifting your weight or climbing down. On a ladder that is impossible: you stand with your upper body twisted, and within a metre your cut line has already wandered away from the ceiling join. Over four walls that adds up to an edge nobody wants to look at.

An outdoor model like the RS51 is a poor choice here, even though it reaches far higher. The parts are longer, it does not go through an ordinary doorway, and the deck stands higher than a room with a three metre ceiling can take. If you need genuine reach in a void or a stairwell, look at a slim one person tower instead. And when the elevation outside comes up later in the year, you hire a mobile scaffold for that job separately, because indoor and outdoor builds are not interchangeable.

On interior work the highest point is nearly always the seam between wall and ceiling. In an average sitting room that seam hangs somewhere between two and three metres, while a house with a raised ceiling or a void puts you comfortably past four. A working height of 3 to 4 metres covers that: the deck sits at one and a half to two metres and you reach roughly two metres above it, which is where the figure comes from. Which parts belong to it is set out at the four metre build.

Measure indoors from the bare floor, so not from a thick underlay or from the raised hearth. Ten centimetres sounds like nothing, but inside you work to small margins: you want the ceiling line at eye level and not just above your crown. Cut in with your head tipped back and you simply cannot see the line, and your brush drifts off the seam without you noticing. You find out when the room is furnished again and the light comes in from the side.

Look as well at what else hangs from the ceiling. A light, a smoke alarm, a curtain track or a beam can decide how tall your build may actually be. A position that stops just under such an obstacle and lets you stand solidly beats a taller one you have to steer around with a full kettle in your hand. For a room in an older house with high plastered ceilings on the first floor, this is the usual choice, and it is worth measuring before you book rather than after the parts arrive.

Do not push the build tight into the corner but leave a hand's width. With the castors against the plaster you can no longer cut the corner line square on, and you work with a twisted wrist at exactly the spot where a wobble shows most. A few centimetres of clearance gives you sight of both walls at once and lets you draw the vertical line in one flowing pass from the ceiling seam down to the skirting, without lifting the brush.

Under the build lies the problem of the skirting. The four feet and the stabilisers stand precisely on the strip where your bottom edge has to be cut, and that edge you do from floor level anyway. So finish the lowest fifty centimetres of a wall face completely before you roll the tower in front of it. Then you never have to touch that strip again and the build can stay put until the whole face is done, second coat included.

Protect the floor that is already down. Put hardboard or heavy sheeting under the castors, certainly on parquet or a poured floor, and lift those boards with you when you move rather than dragging them through underneath. Take everything off the walls, including the plugs you will not miss, and push the furniture into the middle of the room. Around the build you need walking room for your kettle, your bucket and a roller on a long extension pole, and none of that fits if the sofa is still standing where it was.

The painting itself moves along; the waiting fills your days. An average room with four wall faces takes a day for the first coat, but the second may only go on once the first is dry right through, and with interior emulsion that swallows a good part of a day. In practice you land on two hire days for a room getting two coats, and on three to four once several rooms are meant to follow one another. Book them as one run.

Count the preparation in as well. Filling holes, stopping, sanding and then getting the dust off runs to half a day easily, and most of it happens from the same build you later paint from. Anyone who only books the room scaffold for the painting days ends up doing that preparation from a step stool after all, with precisely the back ache and the ragged edges they meant to avoid. Leave the build standing from the sanding through to the last coat.

The way the rates are put together works in your favour here. Day one is the only one billed at the full rate; from the second onwards a 95 per cent reduction lands on each hire day, so that extra drying day hardly features in the budget. The page showing the rental price per model sets out how it lands for the room scaffold. Booking two separate spells for two rooms almost always costs more than one continuous week, if only for the double transport.

A deck length of 245 cm gives you a good two metres of wall per position. That is exactly the measure you think in: cut the ceiling line over that full length, cut the corner if you are standing at one, and roll the field beneath it straight away. Always finish your edges up there before you pick up the roller, because a drip from the brush onto a freshly rolled band cannot be removed without redoing the whole band.

Keep the sequence per wall face and not per operation. So not all the ceiling lines in the room first and then all the rolling, but face by face from corner to corner. That way the paint stays equally wet as you close the band and no joins show up later in raking light. If a wall runs further than your position reaches, move only once a band is complete, never halfway through a strip that is still wet. Plan where those breaks fall before you open the first tin.

Carry up what you genuinely need and nothing else: a kettle, a brush, a roller on a short handle and a cloth. A ten litre tub of emulsion belongs on the floor below, not on your deck. Send a second person up with anything heavy rather than carrying it one handed on the ladder. If the ceiling in the same room is also getting done, plan that before the walls, and check the order in painting the ceiling, so the room scaffold only has to go up once.

Everything turns up in pieces, counted through and complete, and it still has to come inside. Reckon on several trips between the pavement and the room, and clear the hall and the stairs beforehand so you can get a long tube round the turn without taking a chunk out of the wallpaper. If your order is in on a normal working day and beats 15:00, it is dropped off the working day after. Both the arrival day and the collection day are yours to name.

Have the parts come the day before you start. That gives you time to carry everything in, put the build together, mask the floor and clear the room, and you begin fresh with sanding the next morning. Assembly is your job: the enclosed manual and the film show the order, and with two people the room scaffold stands within a couple of hours, without a single tool being needed. Doing that on the morning you meant to start painting simply eats the day.

When the final coat has dried you break the build down and carry the parts back outside, after which we take them away again. Wipe the deck boards and get the spatters off the tubes before stacking them, because emulsion that has dried on is awkward to shift later. What bringing and collecting within your province comes to is set out on the page about delivery, VAT included and settled per journey rather than per day.

Indoors the same requirements apply as outside: EN 1004, load class 3, meaning 200 kg to a square metre of deck. On painting work you come nowhere near that, but the temptation to use the deck as a table for tins, rollers, your phone and a radio is strong. Keep it clear instead. Anything lying loose up there is something to trip over at the moment your head is at the ceiling line and your eyes are nowhere near your feet.

Brake the castors as soon as the build is in position, and never shove it along while somebody is still up there, not even the half metre to the left that looks so harmless. Fold the stabilisers out indoors just as consistently as you would outside; a smooth room floor with a crease in the sheeting under it lets a build slide away. You will find what that standard demands of a build in the standard these towers are built to.

The risk with painting indoors lies in the details of the room. A door swinging open against an upright, a child wandering in, a spot of paint on smooth sheeting: small things that become large at two metres up. Wedge the door on a hook, hang a cloth over the guard rail for your brush and mop up spilled paint the moment it lands rather than at the end of the day. The rest of the rules you will find in the article about working on a tower indoors.