Painting a fence? Choose the right scaffold.

The Altrex MiTower is the obvious model here: 75 cm wide, built around one user and light in the hand. You push it along the boundary entirely by yourself, it passes through a garden gate without trouble, and no second person has to be rounded up to help you move it. That fits paintwork, where you stand alone with a roller for most of a day anyway. Specifications sit on the page for the MiTower in our hire range, including its transport weight.

A 135 cm rolling tower would only get in the way out here. The stabilisers reach into the border, turning between two hedges is impossible, and shifting it at every bay eats more time than the coat itself. Deck area is not what this job needs, since painting a fence calls for a tin, a roller and a brush for the edges. More deck area simply means more components to raise at the start and more weight to drag through the garden at every bay.

Do check the MiTower will actually reach your back garden. A gate leaf of eighty centimetres, a narrow passage down the side of the house or a flight of steps up to a raised terrace are where it comes unstuck. Faced with one of those, carry the components round loose and build at the back instead. It is worth pacing that route out before the hire dates are chosen, because painting a fence begins with getting the tower to it at all.

A standard boundary comes to two metres, and with trellis on top perhaps two and a half. None of that calls for an impressive structure or a tall one. The smallest setting of this model reaches 4.2 metres, which is more than adequate, even where the run meets a shed wall you intend to include. Those two metres in the sum are the arm's length that still lets you reach a top edge in comfort, and adding them to your platform height gives the working height.

In practice you paint from the lowest deck position, somewhere around knee or hip level, and the structure serves chiefly as a steady plateau. That is precisely why a boundary demands so little height: what matters is the angle of your body to the board, not the distance to the ground. The page covering a build of four metres shows what such a setting looks like once assembled, and it is the setting most people hire for garden timber.

Measure anyway. If the boundary sits on a low wall, if the neighbouring plot lies lower, or if the garden falls away towards a ditch, your starting point moves and one side needs more reach than the other. This model will go up to 6.2 metres if pressed, so height is never the constraint. Building higher than you need only adds time at the assembly stage and gives nothing back while painting a fence, so take the measurement and then stop worrying about height altogether.

In a garden the ground is where things go wrong. Grass yields the moment it is wet, topsoil even faster, and shell or gravel lets the castors sink straight in. Lay a few sound boards or paving slabs under the wheels, or else simply keep to the terrace and the hard path. At the same time the stabilisers have to swing out freely on both sides, which between a boundary and a planted border is less obvious than it sounds. Check for level again after every move.

Look at what lines your route as well. A water butt, an outside tap, a low branch, a raised bed or a footing that just clears the soil are all things the tower will catch on. Clear away what can be cleared and work out in advance where lifting has to replace rolling. Measure the gate opening as well, because every component has to pass through it before anything can be raised. On a sloping lawn, the approach to uneven ground gives you the right method for getting level.

Work out in advance how you will get at the far face. Where the boundary adjoins a neighbour's plot you need their cooperation to paint that side, and sometimes the tower has to travel through their garden as well. Arrange all of that before the hire is booked, because painting a fence on one face only is a job you will find yourself repeating within a couple of seasons, and hiring twice costs more than asking once.

Opaque paint means arithmetic. Two coats across both faces of a twenty metre boundary comes to eighty metres of painting, and that ignores the preparation entirely. Sanding, degreasing, priming the bare patches and dealing with the posts as a separate exercise swallows a whole day on its own. For the whole undertaking count on three days with the tower in your garden, and four along a really long run. Count your bays first and you will know exactly what you are taking on.

Between coats sits waiting time you cannot shorten. Paint has to cure before the next coat goes over it, and how long that takes is decided by the product and the weather rather than by your diary. Outdoor painting also fails in rain, in dew and in full afternoon sun. In practice you work in blocks of a few hours spread across several days, so what you are really hiring is the time in which the paint can do its own work undisturbed.

That is why a roomy reservation pays. The whole of that first twenty four hours goes at the standard rate, after which ninety five per cent comes off every following day, so an added day scarcely shows in the rental price. If the weather turns kind you simply report an earlier collection date. That date is yours to give when reserving, and it is where all of the flexibility in the arrangement actually comes from.

Opaque paint lays a closed film on the timber, which asks for a different approach from stain. You build it up: a primer on bare patches, then two thin coats rather than one heavy one. Thin coats key better, they do not sag, and they dry evenly on the end grain where a heavy coat never does. Work one bay between two posts and finish it completely before pushing the tower onward, or the place where you stopped will show through the film afterwards and no amount of rubbing will disguise it.

Fix the order and keep to it: posts first, then the top rail, then the boards working downwards. That way any runs get picked up by a band you still have to cover anyway. A roller does most of the work, while the joints between the boards and the cut ends have to be chased in with a brush. Those edges drink the most of the paint and dry the fastest of all. If you move on to stain on other garden timber, keep the products strictly apart.

Protect whatever is underneath you. Paint travels further than expected, especially off a roller, and on slabs or block paving it dries fast to the surface. Lay sheeting or card across the full width of the bay in hand and drag it along with the tower as you go. Painting a fence over a patio without first covering the slabs is a decision people regret for a very long time indeed, and no hire day is short enough to make it worth the risk.

The components arrive as a complete set, counted for completeness before loading. Agree in advance where they may lie and choose somewhere dry: the drive, the terrace or at a pinch the garage, but never the middle of a soaking wet lawn. Send the booking in on a weekday and beat the 15:00 mark, and everything you ordered is waiting on the ground one working day afterwards. Cover the stack if showers are forecast, since wet boards are slippery to build with.

Assembly belongs to the hire and it belongs to you; we do not come and erect anything, and nothing leaves us standing. With this light model it goes quickly, guided by the supplied manual and the film. Do it the day before your first coat, so that on painting day nothing has to be spannered together first. The order of each lift appears in this step by step account of the assembly. Give it a quiet hour rather than squeezing it in.

Arrival and departure are dates you enter yourself when reserving. Once the final coat has dried you take the tower down and stack the parts in the agreed spot, and we call by to load them. Anyone whose garden lies close to the city may pick them up in person instead, by appointment and for nothing, at Zeeburgerpad 89 in Amsterdam, provided the vehicle takes the whole lot in one go rather than in two separate journeys across town.

A fence post stands in the ground or in a shoe and is designed for wind and for the weight of the boards. Putting a ladder against it adds a force that pushes sideways, exactly where the post has least to give. You do not see the result at once, but after a season the line stands out of true and boards begin pulling loose. On a newly built boundary with fresh concrete footings that happens faster still, because the concrete has yet to reach anything like full strength.

A free standing tower never touches the boundary at all. It carries its own weight, sits on four braked castors and has stabilisers of its own, so the load goes into the ground rather than into your boards. On top of that you keep both hands free, which on a ladder is simply not possible once a tin and a roller are involved. The two options are weighed up in this piece on choosing between a ladder and a tower.

The familiar agreements apply otherwise. The towers go out in accordance with EN 1004 under load class 3, which is two hundred kilos of bearing capacity for each square metre, and with paint and tools you never approach that. Lock the brakes before stepping aboard, roll the tower along only when the deck is empty, and stop working once the wind gets up. Spilled paint underfoot makes a platform slippery, so wipe it while painting a fence rather than afterwards.