Painting a ceiling? Choose the right scaffold.

For ceiling work in a living room, a bedroom or a hall the Altrex RS44 is the model that fits. It is a room scaffold, made to be used inside, and its frames go through a doorway of roughly 70 cm in sections you carry by hand. That sounds like a detail until you have to take a build along a passage, squeeze past a stair rail and turn one more corner on a landing. The broader models among the wheeled scaffolds we hire out stop at the first door frame.

On a deck of 245 cm you are seldom up there with just the roller. There is a kettle or a bucket, a spare sleeve, a cutting-in brush, a screwdriver for the light fitting and a rag for the spatter that ceiling work always throws down. You want that lot beside your feet rather than hooked over a guard rail, because your face is turned upwards and you would rather not grope about blindly below you. A fixed place for the kettle saves you half a minute on every band.

With two of you it runs better still: one cuts the edges in, the other rolls the open surface, and you take turns on the deck. This build copes with that perfectly well, as long as you do not both plant yourselves beside a full ten litre bucket at the same moment. If you are unsure whether this model suits your room or whether an ordinary wheeled one would serve you better, this comparison of the two types sets the differences out.

The highest point of this job is the ceiling itself, which makes measuring up pleasantly unambiguous. In a post-war house it hangs at around 2.60 metres, in a nineteen thirties property nearer 3 metres, and above a void or in a converted upper flat a good deal more. Measure from the bare surface the castors will end up resting on. If there is still carpet down that comes out before you paint, take the state the room will be in while the job runs.

The rule that working height equals platform height plus roughly 2 metres of reach lands differently on a ceiling than on a facade. You do not want the roller shoved up on straight arms but held just above the crown of your head, so you are after a deck height that leaves your head about half a metre below the surface you are coating. For the usual room heights that puts you in the 3 to 4 metre build, precisely the span this model was made for.

Sit too low and you stand there stretching, lose sight of your wet edge and lay a coat that covers unevenly, which you get to put right on the next pass anyway. Choose too generously and you roll with a bent neck and feel it in your lower back within the hour. Caught between two stands, take the higher one and leave the bottom section out of use; that costs you nothing in build time. Which platform stand goes with which reach is set out on the page about four metres of working height.

Painting a ceiling happens in an empty room. Everything that can leave moves to another room, the rest shifts into the middle under a sheet, and the middle is exactly the ground you need for wheeling about. So clear a free strip from wall to wall first, because that is where the build has to travel. A cupboard that stays where it is quietly decides where you start and where you finish, so walk that route once before you cover a single thing.

Then look at the floor everything will rest on. On laminate, parquet or a poured floor you want no castor marks and no brace rubbing along a skirting, so put hardboard or thick card down wherever you come to a standstill. A threshold between two rooms is not something you simply ride across with an assembled tower. Spare a thought too for the pendant light or the smoke alarm hanging right above your route, which is better taken down before you start.

Space has to be left at the base for the stabilisers, and between four walls that is tighter than it looks. A radiator, a deep window board or a door that swings inwards sits in the swing of such a leg soon enough. Keep the doorway itself clear as well, since you walk through it all day with kettles and sleeves. If the walls are next on your list, that approach is covered under emulsioning walls that run up high.

Painting a ceiling in an average room rolls out in a couple of hours, but that is not where it ends. Beforehand the edges have to be cut in, holes filled, dust wiped off and the whole space covered. After that comes the wait until the coat is hard enough to go over a second time. If there is an old mark in it, or you are moving from a dark colour to white, a blocking coat joins the queue and you make three passes instead of two.

Add those passes together and you are at two or three days with the scaffold simply left standing in the room. That is the practical reason to take a longer period than the arithmetic suggests: striking the build and putting it back up a day later costs more effort than leaving it where it stands between coats. How best to pin down the length of your period is described in the piece on taking a scaffold by the day or by the week.

For what you pay, that works in your favour. Only that first twenty-four hour block goes at the full rate; from the second hire day onwards 95 per cent comes off, so a day given over to hardening barely touches what you pay. Hire tightly and you find yourself looking at a half-finished ceiling with a van already outside. Put your end date past the day the last coat goes on rather than on it, and keep the following morning free for clearing up.

A deck of 245 cm gives you a ceiling strip of a good two metres from each standing position. Divide the room into strips like that in advance and work them in a fixed order, usually from the window into the room, so the raking light travels with you and you can see where you had got to. Cut the entire perimeter in with the brush first, or halfway along you will be shuffling about with two tools in your hands at once.

You roll towards the wet edge. As long as that edge is still open the next band runs into it invisibly, which means the build has to move on before the paint pulls away. Work in a short rhythm, then: roll the strip out, step down, brakes off, push on one platform length, brakes back on, climb up again. On your own, reckon the move itself takes a minute, and set the length of your bands so that minute never falls in the middle of an open edge.

What travels up with you stays modest: the roller and pole, a filled kettle, the cutting-in brush and a rag. You top up on the floor, not with a bucket over your arm on the rungs. Do not underestimate how often you move on, because you multiply that number by the number of passes. A room of four by five metres runs to some eight positions per coat, and three passes over that makes twenty-four moves. If a gun appeals more than a roller, look at spraying ceilings instead.

The scaffold reaches your address as separate parts, counted and complete in a single drop. Point out beforehand where that stack may land, since the room you are about to work in has just been cleared and sheeted, and tubes dragged over your covers help nobody. A hallway, a utility room or a garage answers better. An order confirmed on a working day before the 15:00 cut-off goes out the following working day, so pick the date that suits your preparation.

Assembly is not part of the delivery. You put it together yourself, working from the printed manual and the instruction video, and with two of you it is done inside the hour. We do not turn up to build, and nothing leaves the depot in an assembled state. Both the arrival date and the collection date are yours to set when you book. If you would rather drive and the car will take it, collection from our Amsterdam address on Zeeburgerpad costs nothing once an appointment has been made.

Once the last coat is on we come back for the parts; all you do is take them apart and lay them out complete. Wait until the ceiling feels dry before you do, because otherwise you are carrying tubes past a fresh surface and you will see that later in the light. Count everything through while you are dismantling. What the run out and back costs in your part of the country is listed under delivery charges by province.

Every square metre of this deck is rated for 200 kg, the figure EN 1004 attaches to load class 3. When painting a ceiling you do not come near that limit in a hurry, unless there are two of you up top with a full ten litre bucket standing between you and a tool case carried up as well. In that case run the sum once. What such a limit means in practice is explained under weight and loading on a scaffold.

Lock the castors before your foot touches the first rung, and keep them locked while anyone remains on the deck. An indoor floor is slicker than a pavement, so an unbraked tower slides away with less provocation. The urge to have somebody nudge you along a metre while you are still rolling runs high on this job, because you want to stay ahead of that wet edge, but a tower carrying a person or a load is never wheeled anywhere. Step down, push on, brake, climb again.

The risks that belong specifically to a ceiling are of another kind. You look upwards for hours on end, which makes your balance less reliable than you realise, and spatter arrives straight in your face. Wear goggles, take a short break every hour and keep the space under the deck free of kettles and cables. If a light fitting is loose, kill the power first. There is more on that under using a scaffold inside the house.