Plastering a shed wall? Choose the right scaffold.

Plastering a shed wall points you at the MiTower, Altrex's one person model with a base 75 cm across, a type carrying on to 6.2 metres of working height. Beside an outbuilding that measurement is a gift: it passes a side gate and a paved path to the back, and you position it alone while the mortar is still dry in its bag. You build it nowhere near the top of that range. Which stages you can order is listed on the page about hiring a slim one-person tower.

There is room on the deck for your tub, your hawk and your trowel, which is precisely what finishing one bay demands. Any more material than that is a nuisance, because a full tub is heavy and you are hoisting it up yourself. Keep the platform clear of spilled mortar as well: what you leave on it goes hard, and you will be standing on the lumps for the rest of the week. Whatever is not in your hands right now waits below at the mixing spot.

The room scaffold you would reach for indoors drops out here. That model was designed around floors and interior doorways, and it has no answer to garden soil, a path that falls away, or wind along a free-standing face. Outdoors you want adjustable legs and castors resting on a slab or a board. Should an interior wall follow later in the week, the low room scaffold for indoor use shows which type belongs inside the house.

You read the height of this job off the topmost edge that still receives a coat. On a flat-capped outbuilding that is the top course of brickwork; under a pitched roof it is the point where the wall vanishes beneath the eaves. Run your tape to it from the spot where the castors will land, because garden level and terrace level drift apart faster than anyone expects. Out of that comes a deck height, and the reach you book is that deck with roughly two metres of arm added.

For most walls of this kind the answer lands between 4 and 6 metres of working height. Where the face stops under three metres, the lowest stage will do and keeps the hawk close to your body. Where the wall runs on up to the gutter of a tall outbuilding or a garage, take the upper stage this model offers. Which build belongs with which reach is set out at a six metre build stage, together with the matching deck height.

Choosing tight is dearer with mortar than it is with paint, because a band cannot be finished off later. Stand too low for the top fifty centimetres and you have to reposition with a half-loaded hawk in your hand while the edge of the previous band goes off. That shows up afterwards as a shadow line which jumps out in raking light across the face. Take the stage that still leaves you above the top edge with a straight arm when plastering a shed wall.

An outbuilding rarely has a tidy drive running alongside it. More often there is a paved path some fifty centimetres wide, a planted border next to that, and then the lawn beyond it. Look at where the four castors come down and where your mixing spot goes, because both want space and you do not want to step across planting carrying a full bucket. Put the tub and the mixer on the side you begin from, so you never have to walk round the set-up with a loaded hawk in one hand.

The ground weighs more heavily here than on dry trades. Under a tower where render is going on, water arrives: gauging water, rinsing water and whatever slides off the hawk. On garden soil that turns to mud inside an hour and the castors sink into it. So put slabs or thick boards down, under the adjustable legs as well, and tip your bucket out well away from the base. Staying stable on such ground is covered in the pointers for a base that will not sit level.

Look too at whatever is parked against the masonry. Beside an outbuilding that is usually a rack of pots, a stack of firewood, a compost bin, or the butt the downpipe feeds. All of it has to move before the van arrives, and along the full length of the face rather than only where you intend to start. When you shift position halfway through a bay you want nothing at all in the way with a hawk in your hand.

The rendering itself goes quickly; it is everything round it that fills your hire days. Count on one day of preparation: degreasing, knocking off loose material, filling cracks and damping the background down. Then comes the render day itself. On a two-coat build another day sits in between while the first coat pulls in and firms up enough to take the next. For a face of four by three metres, plastering a shed wall therefore works out at three hire days, and the assembly morning is not yet in that figure.

Outdoors the weather gets a vote. Below about five degrees it stops, and a frost overnight on fresh mortar makes the work worthless however fine the following day turns out. Blazing sun or a stiff wind is no better, since the face then pulls in faster than you can rule it off. The consequence is that your period must not sit tightly around the render day itself. A week that yields only two usable days is entirely ordinary on this kind of job, and nobody should treat that as bad luck.

Shifting things about is fortunately cheap. Only the opening 24 hours carry the whole amount; whatever you attach behind that runs at 95 per cent off. Pinning down five days instead of three therefore barely alters the rental price, while it buys you two chances to dodge a frost or a shower. Booking wide is the rule here rather than the exception. How that works out per type is shown at the tower rates including VAT.

A deck 245 cm long is your bay width on this job. A four metre face therefore takes two positions, and that single moment of moving gets chosen before you tear a bag open. Pick a point where the wall is already interrupted anyway: a window opening, a door frame, or the corner of the building itself. The seam between two sessions then falls on a line that was in the elevation to begin with, and nobody will pick it out afterwards from the garden.

Inside one position, work downwards. Begin at the top edge, rule off, and drop with the hawk to the next stretch, so material that falls lands on wall you have not touched instead of a face you have just brought flat. The bottom fifty centimetres you do standing on the ground, off the tower altogether. When plastering a shed wall, reckon on half a tub to a whole tub of mortar per bay, depending on how deep the joints have been raked out.

How hard the background sucks sets your pace. Old dry brickwork takes the water straight out and swallows your working time, so damp it first and lay on in smaller panels. Concrete, or a face that was rendered once before, hardly draws at all and stays wet longer. Test it with a wet sponge before you fix the render day, because the answer governs how many bays you manage in a day and therefore how long you keep the tower on hire.

The scaffold reaches you in pieces: uprights, a deck, guardrails, braces and the four adjustable legs, every item counted before the van pulls away. Settle in advance where that pile may sit, since the strip beside the masonry will be taken by tub and mixer. A drive or a terrace suits that pile far better than grass does, where the pieces sink in and come up wet. Get the order away on a weekday ahead of 15:00 and your delivery falls on the next working day, leaving the evening before for clearing up.

Which day the van pulls up, and which day it takes everything back, is your choice. With render outdoors you look at the nights first: with frost in the forecast, move the whole block rather than the render day alone. Standing the thing up is your task, with a manual and an instruction video within reach, and it swallows an hour that people forget to plan. Follow the order given in a written out assembly plan.

With the final coat on, take everything apart and set the pieces together in one spot; we come along afterwards to load them. Rinse the deck and the uprights down first, since mortar that has cured on aluminium will not come off later. If you can drive it yourself, the whole set may be picked up by arrangement, at no charge, from Zeeburgerpad 89 in Amsterdam. What bringing it to your province costs is listed at the rates for delivery and collection.

This type sits in load class 3 under EN 1004, which allows two hundred kilos of carrying capacity on every square metre of deck. With render that matters more than it does with paint, because a full tub is heavy and there are often two of them up at once. Distribute it over the run of the platform; stacking everything into one corner is exactly what you do not want, even if that happens to be the corner you are working from. What the class covers is explained at the note on this standard.

Beyond that the usual agreements apply. Wheels braked before you step on, nothing and nobody aboard while it is being moved, and down you go once it starts to blow. You will reach that wind threshold sooner here than elsewhere, because a free-standing outbuilding usually sits on the open side of a garden and takes the weather full on. After every reposition, walk the four legs round and set them out firmly again before the tub goes up.

The hazard that belongs to this job is wet and slick. Mortar on a deck turns treacherous the moment water joins it, so sweep between bays and rinse off at the end of the day. Wear boots with a decent tread on them, and place the tub where you are not obliged to step over it at all. Keep the ground beneath the tower clear of people, because a dropped trowel or a tipped bucket arrives hard down there. More on that at safe work at height.