Staining a fence? Choose the right scaffold.

For this job you hire the Altrex MiTower, a tower rated for one user and measuring 75 cm across. In a garden that width decides everything: it has to pass a border, get through a gate and travel a path that is rarely more than a metre wide. You also push it onward single handed, which over a long boundary happens dozens of times in one afternoon. The model is described in full on the page about hiring the MiTower, including what fits in a car.

A broad 135 cm rolling tower buys you nothing out here. In a back garden it cannot be turned properly, the stabilisers flatten your planting, and at every panel you spend longer manoeuvring than staining a fence. The extra deck area goes unused anyway, because this job needs a tin, a brush and a rag and no more than that. The difference between them is unpicked in this comparison of the narrow and the wide design, which settles the question quickly.

Do bear in mind that a single person tower really is meant for one person. If two of you want to work at once, you either hire a second one or split the job so that the second pair of hands sands and fills at ground level. In practice it saves less time than people expect, because one of you ends up waiting on the other anyway, and only a single tin stands open at any moment while staining a fence from a narrow deck.

An ordinary boundary reaches two metres, and it seldom stops there. Trellis goes on top of it, the run meets a carport, or the whole thing carries on until it reaches a shed wall. Measure to the highest edge that still takes stain rather than to the top of the boards. The smallest build of this tower already starts at 4.2 metres, which is ample for the work, so hiring inside the 4 to 6 metre range covers even an unusually tall run with plenty to spare.

Working height means the height of the deck plus about two metres of reach, which explains why the top setting is almost never needed. Staining a fence usually leaves you standing half a metre to a metre and a half up, using the tower mainly as a stable rolling floor. Stand higher than that and it is normally because a shed roof or a pergola joins the boundary and you have to work over it. What each build offers appears at the four metre setting.

Measure from the garden and not from the pavement out front. If your terrace sits higher than the back path, or the boundary stands on three courses of brick, everything shifts upward with it. The same is true where the run climbs a bank: reaching is easy on one side and half a metre short on the other. Take the measurement at the lowest patch of ground the castors will actually stand on before you settle on a build, and write that figure down before the booking page is open.

Ground conditions in a garden are the real difference from work against a house. Grass gives way under castors as soon as it has rained, and a planting bed offers no support at all. Put paving slabs or sound boards under the base, or keep to the terrace and the back path. The stabilisers need to swing clear on both sides, and in a narrow plot that conflicts with the planting sooner than anyone expects. Check the base is level again after every single move along the run.

Walk the route you intend to follow before the delivery arrives. A water butt, a compost heap, a low branch from next door and a projecting post footing all sit exactly where they are least welcome. Clear what can be cleared and note where the tower will have to be lifted rather than rolled. Measure the gate opening while you are at it, since the whole thing has to pass through it. On sloping ground, the method for an uneven surface gets you level.

Do not forget the far side. If both faces are being treated, the tower has to reach the neighbours or the back alley too, and that takes agreement and sometimes a different order of work. Settle all that before the hire dates are fixed, because a boundary treated on one face only looks worse than one left alone entirely. A shared gate key is worth asking about at the same time, along with a spot where the components may rest.

Fifteen metres of boundary will not be finished in an afternoon. Each panel between two posts takes a quarter of an hour once preparation, the coat itself and the end grain are counted, and multiplying that by the number of panels and then by two faces adds up quickly. On top of that, penetrating stain often wants two coats, and the first has to sink in before the second follows. Reckon on the tower standing with you for two to three days.

The weather settles the rest. Working in full sun leaves streaks because the product disappears too fast, and in rain or heavy dew you cannot start at all. In practice you work in the morning and again late in the afternoon, which means whole days pass when the hired tower simply stands there doing nothing. That is no problem at all provided those days sit inside your booking, so plan around the forecast rather than around your own days off.

The tariff makes that affordable. The full charge covers the opening day only, and each day after it comes with ninety five per cent knocked off, so two spare days barely register in the rental price. Book too tightly and the last four panels cost you a whole second build. Since the collection date is yours to name, extending afterwards is rarely necessary once you have allowed for weather at the start, and staining a fence is a job the weather rules completely.

Penetrating stain behaves nothing like paint: it soaks into the timber and forms no film you can touch in later. Visible joins appear precisely where you stopped and then started again on a board that had half dried. So work each board over its whole length, from one post to the next, and only then drop to the board below. A panel between two posts is usually about two metres, which matches a single tower position neatly and puts every join on a post rather than out in the open.

Newly delivered timber needs care. Freshly treated boards are still full of the preservative they were given and will barely accept stain, so the product sits on the surface and turns tacky instead of soaking in. Leave such timber outside for a while and test on an inconspicuous board to see whether it takes anything yet. If you later move to an opaque coating on the same boundary, an entirely different set of rules applies to the preparation and to the number of hire days.

Think about what falls beneath you. Stain is thin, drips readily off a brush and soaks into slabs and block paving just as willingly as into timber. Sheet the ground under your working panel with card or plastic and slide it along as you move. A drop wiped away at once is nothing; a drop found the following morning is a permanent mark on somebody's patio, which is why the sheeting travels with the tower rather than staying where you first put it down.

What pulls up is a set of loose components, counted before it left our yard. Choose a drop point where the stack stays dry and out of the way, because in a garden loose parts sink into wet grass within the hour. A drive or a stretch of terrace beats the lawn itself. Any weekday order placed while the clock still shows less than 15:00 puts the components on your path the following working day. Throw a sheet over the stack if rain is coming, because wet boards are needlessly slippery to build with.

The build is left to you: we do not put towers up and we hand nothing over standing. With this model that is no hardship, since it is light and straightforward, and with the manual and the video beside you an hour or two sees it done. Do it the day before you intend to start work, so that the next morning begins with dry boards and a tower already standing there and waiting for you. The order of the lifts is in this explanation of the build sequence.

Arrival and departure are two separate dates that you fill in yourself, and out in a garden the forecast deserves a say in both. When the last coat is on, take the tower apart and pile the components up again; we come and fetch them. Living near enough to Amsterdam, you may fetch them yourself instead at no cost, by appointment, from Zeeburgerpad 89, provided your vehicle swallows the whole lot in one journey rather than two.

Load class 3 under EN 1004 covers our whole fleet, and that permits two hundred kilos for every square metre of decking. Staining a fence never approaches such a figure, because the only cargo up there is a tin and a brush. What matters far more is that a tower rated for one user is genuinely used by one person alone: nobody else climbs up to hand anything over. The standard is unpicked in this note on the standard behind them.

The usual agreements hold in a garden too. Brakes go on before you step aboard, you roll along only with an empty deck, and you stop the moment a strong wind gets up. Wind is doubly awkward here: it carries your product onto the neighbours' planting and it dries the stain off before you have spread it out. A still morning gives the best finish, so look hard at the forecast before any tin is opened and before the hire days are chosen.

The risk that genuinely stands out is the floor under your boots. Spilled stain turns a platform treacherous and you generally only find out about it when a foot slides. Wipe a splash away at once and lay a sheet of card down underfoot if need be. Look at what sits beneath you as well, because a garden table or a child's bike under a tower is exactly what you roll into when moving along the line, and staining a fence involves a great many of those small moves.