Plastering a ceiling? Choose the right scaffold.

Indoors you take the Altrex RS44, the room scaffold intended for work inside houses, whose parts pass a door frame from roughly 70 cm. On plaster work that counts twice over, because you carry in not only the scaffold but bags of material, a mixing tub, water and a bucket of clean rinse water as well. The shorter the route from your mixing point to the build, the less working time disappears into walking. A model you cannot even get along the hall has cost you that time before you begin.

A second reason to pick this one indoors is the floor you stand on. Plastering is done with force: you press the float against the plane, brace yourself and shift your weight across. A wobbly hop-up or a ladder is unfit for that, whereas a fixed platform of 245 cm lets you take half a pace sideways without checking where your foot will land. Which models are standing ready can be seen among the indoor towers we keep on hire.

If a lot of material has to go aloft at once a wider platform looks tempting, but a build like that will not come down your hall and certainly not up your stairs. Outdoors you could hire a mobile scaffold such as the RS51, the narrow 75 cm model that spans 4.2 to 14.2 metres; between four walls you solve it another way. Keep the tub small and refill more often from the mixing point below. Whether a given frame clears your doorway is covered under getting a tower through the door.

Take the height your deck sits at, allow about two metres of reach on top, and that is the working height you plan around. On plaster work you use that reach differently from a painter: you need not only to arrive at the surface but to push against it, and you only push properly with bent arms. Stand too low and you shove upward on straight arms and lose the even pressure on your float, which shows in the thickness of the coat straight away.

So measure more than the distance from floor to ceiling; work out where your shoulders are going to sit. Ceilings sitting between 2.60 and 3 metres put you in the 3 to 4 metre build this model was made for. In an older property with ceilings over 3 metres, check whether you are still inside that span. Check too whether a beam or a dropped section hangs anywhere along the route you have to wheel under. A dropped bulkhead can easily cost you a whole platform stand.

A wrong stand costs you more here than on paintwork, because you cannot simply begin again. Once the material stiffens your coat lies the way it lies. Settle the platform height before you mix the first tub, then rehearse half a metre of the plane with nothing on the float to feel whether you can put enough force in. Standing wrong, you reset in ten minutes; halfway through a run you cannot. Those ten minutes are the cheapest part of the whole hire. See the reach a four metre build gives you.

This job wants two places: a mixing point and a working point. The mixing point belongs in the same room or immediately beside it, with water within reach, a socket for the mixer and a floor that can take splashes. The working point is the scaffold itself, and it has to be able to travel there without scraping past the tub. So put the mixing point in a corner you do not pass at every position. A tub left in the middle of your run gets moved more often than the tower does.

The floor underneath deserves attention, because plaster work always spills. Lay sheeting with the edges turned up, and remember that spilt material dries under a castor into a hard lump. Sweep that away before you wheel on again. On parquet or a poured floor, put boards down wherever you come to a halt, because the pressure of a loaded platform otherwise stays visible in the surface. That applies especially here, where you and the tub together weigh close to double.

Around the foot there has to be room for the stabilisers, and indoors their swing meets a radiator, a door or a window board soon enough. Walk the space while it is still bare and tape out where the legs will land. If the walls follow the ceiling, that order of work sits under plastering walls. You then wheel the same build along the wall, which is a second reason not to book a tight period. Walls and ceiling on one booking beat two separate hires by a distance.

Plastering a ceiling is faster than people imagine: a room of normal size is on inside half a day, provided you can wheel along without hitches. What fills the days is everything around it. Before you start, the surface has to be free of dust and sometimes primed, the room emptied and the sheeting down. Afterwards the work has to harden before you can sand, emulsion or paper over it, and that time cannot be bought off. All of it sits inside the hire period rather than beside it.

Reckon therefore on two to three hire days for a single room. A day to prepare the space and build the tower, a day to lay and flatten, and a day of slack in case the second coat can only go on the following morning. With several rooms the rhythm rolls forward and the build stays where it stands. Ways of pinning that period down are gathered in the checklist for booking a tower. Put the collection date at the end of that run rather than in the middle of it.

A generous booking is cheap on work of this kind. Day one is billed whole; each further day is cut back by ninety-five per cent, so slack in the schedule barely moves the rental price. That is welcome, because plaster refuses to be hurried: you cannot force a second coat simply because the van happens to be coming tomorrow. Pick your collection well past the day you finish the last plane, and allow an hour for striking and cleaning. Neither job goes quickly with mortar still on the tubes.

Each position on a 245 cm deck covers a ceiling strip of a little over two metres, and when plastering a ceiling that measurement sets your whole layout. Divide the ceiling into strips you can manage inside the working time of one tub, and keep the joint between two strips wet throughout. Stop halfway because you forgot something and the edge stiffens, and that transition stays visible under raking light once you have sanded. So lay everything out before you mix, and have the scaffold standing where the first strip begins.

You wheel on with nothing loaded. Take the tub off the deck before you move, however tempting it is to leave it standing, because a shifting mass on top of a rolling build is exactly what you do not want under you. Lock the castors again and lift the tub back up. Working with two, one hands up from below while the other keeps the run going on the deck, which cuts the number of lifts sharply. It also keeps the deck inside the loading the tower is rated for.

Do not forget that you drive the same route a second time. Once the material has stiffened you go over the plane again to flatten and close it, and that round costs nearly as many positions as laying did. Take it into your estimate of hire days, because in practice it doubles the moves; a room of four by five metres then runs to some sixteen positions, and sixteen sets of brakes on and off. For the finishing afterwards, see painting the ceiling once it is dry.

The scaffold arrives as a complete set of separate, counted parts. Point out a place for that stack well away from your mixing point, because on the day itself you walk past there with tubs and bags in your arms. Confirm on a weekday and beat the 15:00 deadline, and the delivery lands with you the next working day. Take it a day ahead of your plastering day, so that building the tower and setting out your kit do not run into one another.

Erecting it falls to you, and nothing leaves us already standing. A printed manual travels with the set and the instruction video walks through the sequence step by step, so with two people it is at most an hour's work before you can climb. You fix the arrival date and the departure date yourself at the moment of booking. Anyone arriving with their own transport may load the set at Zeeburgerpad in Amsterdam without paying, once a slot has been agreed.

When the job is done we call by for the material; dismantling and stacking it complete is your last task. Do that after you have got spilt material off the tubes, because dried mortar will not shift later. Count the set through as you strike it and nothing has to be hunted for. Allow half an hour and stack the parts somewhere dry. The amount charged for the journey to your own province appears under the charges for bringing and fetching.

When plastering a ceiling the loading limit is not theory. A filled tub is heavy, you are standing up there yourself, and sometimes a second person joins you with a second tub. Each square metre may take 200 kg, which is what load class 3 amounts to in EN 1004. So add your load up once before you send everything aloft at the same moment, and set the tub and your tools apart from each other rather than on one point.

Moving happens with a bare deck and nobody aboard, and the brakes are set before your foot finds the first rung. On plaster work that is no formality: a tub that starts to slide during a move shifts the centre of gravity in one movement, and you need both hands to steer the build. After every move walk round the stabilisers and press them firmly back down onto the floor, indoors on a smooth surface just as much as anywhere.

The risks that belong to plaster work sit in the material itself. Spilt mortar turns a platform glassy and dries into a ridge you catch a foot behind, so sweep the deck between two tubs. Work in goggles, because what you press upward partly comes back down, and rinse splashes off your skin at once. Keep the floor under the build free of tubs and leads, since a tub left underneath is what you land on if you slip. The general rules are gathered under building a tower safely.