Painting a shed? Choose the right scaffold.

Painting a shed calls for the MiTower, the single-person Altrex tower measuring 75 cm across its base, a model running up to 6.2 metres of working height. That slim footprint is the point here, not a compromise: you have to get it down a garden path, past a hedge and sometimes through the gap between building and fence. For this job you assemble it well below the top of its range. What else we keep in light towers is described on the page about the single-person MiTower we let out.

The deck of such a tower holds exactly what a shed asks of you and nothing more: one tin of stain, a brush, a sanding block and a cloth. You lift all of it up yourself, and you will be the one pushing the tower across the lawn to the next corner, so a short kit list is a feature rather than a limit. A second person does not belong up there beside you. Where two of you are working, split the job across the walls instead of the platform.

A 135 cm wide mobile scaffold is more than this work needs. You often cannot get it past the flank of the building at all, and on garden soil the extra parts press deeper into the ground with every hour. Such a build only wins when boards are being replaced first and timber, screws and power tools travel up with you. Straight brushwork wants something lighter. The two sit side by side in a comparison of the wider rolling scaffold against the single-person model.

The highest point of a shed is almost never its ridge. You are covering walls, door, barge boards and fascia, and on most garden buildings that fascia lands two and a half to three metres above the soil. Run a tape up to it from the level where the castors will genuinely rest, not from the step outside your back door. Then turn the figure into a deck height, remembering that the reach you book is your platform plus about two metres for the span of your arms.

That lands a shed between 4.2 and 5.2 metres of working height, on a deck two to three metres up. You state the range when you reserve the tower, and it settles which stage of frame goes on the van. Where the building sits on a raised terrace, add the difference before committing; where it stands in a sunken corner, take it off. What each further stage of reach buys you is laid out per build on the page about reach heights per build stage.

Guessing low costs more than a few centimetres. With your eyes level with the fascia you cannot see over its top edge, and an unpainted stripe stays there that you never notice from the lawn. That last band also goes on with stretched arms, which is precisely when a topcoat flows out unevenly and shows brush ends. One stage higher adds almost nothing to the hire, and when painting a shed it spares you a second lap of four walls on a ladder.

Ground round a shed is rarely the same on all four sides. Patio slabs at the front, gravel down one flank, grass behind the building that stays soft for days after rain, and along the fourth wall a border of loose earth. Each time you take the tower round a corner the surface under the castors changes. Walk all four sides before booking and settle per side what has to go underneath: nothing on the slabs, boards on the grass, boards again in the border.

Gravel lets castors slide before the brakes have any grip, so slide a pair of paving slabs or one thick board under them first. A border is not something you flatten in a minute either: lift the planting out or choose a position falling just clear of it. Look for what you cannot see as well, such as an inspection cover, the buried cable feeding the shed light, or a water butt tucked against the wall. Move all that on delivery day, not once the tower stands.

You want a walking strip right round the building too. Stabilisers splay outwards at an angle, and beside something free-standing the fence or hedge sits closer to that splay than expected. Measure the gap between wall and boundary on each of the four sides before reserving anything. Should one of them prove too narrow, work that wall from its end instead, or cut the hedge back a fortnight beforehand. There is more on levelling in the guidance on ground that is not flat.

A building of three by four metres is not an afternoon. Allow one day for sanding, cutting back bare patches and wiping off the dust, then one day per coat for the lap round four walls. Two coats on timber therefore means three hire days with the tower standing in your garden. Add half a day again where a door, a window frame or a small roof edge belongs to the job. Anyone booking tightly is still on the back wall when the van turns up.

The waiting sits between the coats and in the sky. Stain and topcoat both want to sink in and go off properly before anything else goes over them, and outdoors the air decides when that happens. A wall catching sun all afternoon is one you take early in the morning, because warm timber pulls stain in before you have brushed it out. Two wet days in the middle of the week push everything behind them along, so set your end date on the day you are certainly finished.

Booking generously barely registers in what you pay. The full tariff covers just that opening 24 hours; every further day tacked on behind it is billed with 95 per cent knocked off. Pinning down four days rather than two therefore moves the rental price hardly at all, while it leaves you free to let a wet day pass without your schedule collapsing. On exterior timber that is no luxury. How the totals build up per model is set out under our fixed rates including VAT.

A deck 245 cm long covers a little over two metres of wall from each position. A four-metre shed wall is therefore two pitches, and the whole building normally works out at eight to ten pitches. Take every pitch from the top down: fascia and barge board first, then the upper boards, then the band you could still have reached standing on the grass. That way you never drop a run of stain onto a stretch finished ten minutes earlier.

Collect what that wall needs at ground level and carry it up in one trip. On a single-person tower you do not want to climb down three times per pitch for a sheet of abrasive paper. A tin, a brush, a small sanding block, a cloth and a scraper between them cover the whole fascia run. Wedge that tin inside a bucket or hook it under the guardrail, since spilled stain on a patio becomes a whole job of its own once dry.

What almost everyone underestimates when painting a shed is the number of moves. Along a house you keep shuffling the same way, but here you go round, and at every corner the stabilisers come in, the tower turns and everything is set out afresh. Allow ten minutes a corner and four corners a lap. Plan a block of work per wall instead of walking coat by coat round the building. Carry straight on with a run of fence and railing painting and the set-up stays where it is.

You receive no finished tower, only a pile: frame sections, a deck, guardrails, braces and four adjustable legs, tallied before they go in the van. Work out beforehand which corner that pile is allowed to occupy, since the strip beside the building is better kept empty. Patio or drive beats lawn, where parts settle into turf and come back up wet. Reserve before 15:00, and not at a weekend, and the van loads for the following working day, so the parts sit beside your gate before you have started.

You fix the day the van arrives and the day it takes everything away, and with outdoor timber the forecast gets a vote. Put the delivery at the front of a dry run, so the tower goes up calmly and you carry straight on into sanding. Bolting it together belongs to your day, not the driver's, so keep the first hour of it clear. The order of operations for painting a shed is written out in a step by step assembly sequence.

With the last coat behind you, the tower comes apart and the parts go in one heap, and we drive past to load them again. Count out loud while dismantling, tube by tube, and no brace gets left behind in the long grass. Would you rather not wait in for a van? By arrangement you may load the parts yourself, free of charge, at Zeeburgerpad 89 in Amsterdam, provided your vehicle copes with the length. Bringing and fetching is priced in advance under the transport rates per province.

What the frame carries is fixed by EN 1004, which puts this build in load class 3 and permits two hundred kilos for each square metre of decking. Repainting a shed stays comfortably underneath. You weigh what you weigh, and a tin of stain plus some abrasive gear goes on top. With this model the genuine limit is not the load but the head count, since the design assumes one. How that class is arrived at is explained in the background to this standard.

Four habits come with the job as standard. Brakes locked before you take the first rung. Nothing and nobody on the deck while it rolls, not even a half-used tin. Climb up on the inside, through the ladder in the frame, never round the outside. And you come down the moment the wind gets up, which in an open back garden happens sooner than between two terraces. Do not leave splayed legs sticking across a garden path when you go indoors either.

On shed work the risks stay low but close at hand. A knocked-over tin makes the deck slippery, so wedge it and wipe spills straight away. Children and pets wander underneath you in a garden without a thought, so keep that zone clear while you are up. Watch for branches from a hedge or an overhanging tree pushing at the guardrail the moment the hired tower swings round a corner. There is more on that in the ground rules for work at height.