Applying decorative render? Choose the right scaffold.

Applying decorative render is done with a stainless float, so you stand close in with your face half a metre from the wall. Extra deck width only pushes you back out of that working posture. The RS51 at 75 cm is therefore the sensible thing to hire: narrow enough to pass a gate or run down a garden path, wide enough for you and a tub at your feet. Of the builds this model offers, from 4.2 up to 14.2 metres, a house of two storeys uses only the lower part.

The 245 cm deck is your unit of measure on this job. It is the run you can lay on and rule back in one position without moving your feet, and therefore the width in which your wall gets divided into strips. Work out beforehand how many tubs a strip of that size swallows, because climbing down for more halfway through a panel is exactly what ruins it. Two full tubs on the deck and a third standing ready below it tends to work best.

Do not confuse this with the coat beneath it or with indoor work. Laying a thick levelling coat over masonry is heavier going with far more material per metre, and that is described at the page on rendering an outside wall. Smooth plaster indoors wants a different set-up again, usually a room tower, as at the page on plastering interior walls. Decorative render sits between the two of them: outside, thin, decorative and entirely by hand, which changes what the tower has to carry and how often you shift it along the wall.

It is the panel you are coating that sets the height here, not the roof above it. Where the render carries on up under the eaves or against a fascia board, that is your upper limit; where it stops at a band or a string course, measure there instead. On a dwelling of two storeys you land almost every time on 6 to 8 metres. Begin the measurement at the level the castors will finally rest on, because a sloping drive can swallow half a metre of that.

The number on the booking adds two things together: the working height is the deck plus roughly the two metres you gain with your arms. On this job you would rather not be working at the very top of that reach, since above shoulder height the float will not lie flat and the coat goes uneven. Reckon on a deck that brings you up to about chest height at that top edge. How many builds that involves is listed at this working height of eight metres.

Hiring short costs you more than discomfort here. Doing the top strip with straight arms means pressing harder on one side than the other, and later, in raking light, that reads as a wave in the texture. A build that is too low also forces an extra position above, and every extra position is another join. Where you hesitate between two builds, take the one above; it costs a few more components and no extra day.

At the foot of the tower two things compete for the same ground: the stabilisers and your mixing point. In that tub you stir with a drill, a can of water stands beside it and a stack of dry bagged material waits under a sheet. Allow a flat, hard strip about three metres deep alongside the wall. Put the mixing point beside the tower rather than in between the legs, or every move you make begins with lifting a full tub out of the way.

The ground under the castors carries more here than on painting work. A tower with two people, buckets and material on it weighs a good deal more, and on soft grass or freshly laid gravel it will lean within the hour. Put down road plates or thick scaffold boards wherever the surface is not properly made up. Where the garden falls away, take up the difference with proper base plates rather than a stack of bricks; that case is set out in the guide to a tower on uneven ground.

Cover what lies beneath you before anything else. Decorative render throws specks, and dried specks on a terrace, a window cill or a parked car do not simply wipe off. Run sheeting a metre or two out from the wall and mask the frames before the tower is standing, because afterwards you can no longer get at them properly. Think of the neighbours' route past as well if part of the base sits on the pavement. A roll of dust sheet is cheap set against a lost afternoon.

A front wall of two storeys takes two to three days, preparation included. You begin by checking whether the background draws evenly, because a patch that pulls water makes your render set faster there than everywhere else. Then comes the day of real work on the panel itself: laying on, ruling back and setting the texture, in strips joined into one another. Finishing the corners, the abutments and clearing away the sheeting fills the last day of the hire.

On this job the weather runs your diary rather than the other way round. Strong sun on the panel pulls the material before you are ready to texture it, rain washes a fresh coat out and in frost you cannot start at all. Reserve a day or two extra in the booking and decide on the morning itself whether you go. That is cheap insurance, since you pay a full day once and each following day of the booking comes in 95 per cent lower.

Count in the waiting between laying on and texturing as well. The material has to firm up just enough to take the float, and that pause cannot be shortened by anyone working harder. In practice applying decorative render means each panel needs a block of a few hours in which you do nothing else at all. Anyone hoping to do a whole wall on a Saturday almost always runs out of time; two hire days back to back give far more room than one long one.

The grain in the material is your gauge. Choose a two millimetre grain and your coat is two millimetres thick; laying it on heavier does not improve it and does make it prone to cracking. So put the material on generously and then take it back again until the float rasps across the tops of the grains. Ruling back to the grain is the moment the thickness is settled, and it is also the moment you find out whether you mixed too much or too little for the strip.

The join is where two runs meet, and it always shows. Place it therefore on a natural break in the wall: an external corner, a vertical band, the edge of a frame or the line behind a downpipe. Inside such a panel work downwards and travel sideways without a pause. With the 245 cm deck you cover roughly two and a half metres per position, so a panel five metres wide means two positions joined with no interval between them at all.

That shift in between is where this job stands or falls. Brakes off, roll one deck length along, brakes on, check the stabilisers and climb again: that is a couple of minutes, and in those minutes your last run is pulling. With two of you on the deck, one lays on while the other rules back, and you move only once the whole panel is closed. Carry up only what you need, because every descent for a forgotten float counts twice on this work.

Have the tower brought out a day before you render, so that you can put it up unhurried and get the sheeting on. The components arrive as a complete, counted set, and that pile is not wanted on the strip of ground where your mixing tub will stand. The drive or a corner of the garden is better. Where the booking is placed by 15:00, on a working day, the parts go out for the working day that follows; both dates in the hire are yours to choose.

Building it is your task and you tackle it yourself, with the manual supplied and the instruction film alongside. Do it the day before rather than on the morning you want to mix, or your best rendering hour disappears into tubes and braces instead. Reckon too on having to strike the tower completely between two wall panels if you want to turn a corner with it. The step by step guide to putting one up takes you through the order.

After your last hire day the van comes back for the set; you dismantle the tower and stack everything complete. Wait until the render feels dry to the touch, because chipping hardened mortar off tubes is more tedious than the rendering itself. Fetching the set is allowed as well: by appointment the parts wait for you at Zeeburgerpad 89 in Amsterdam and nothing is charged for that, though the tubes will not go in every car. What holds for your province appears at the fixed carriage rates.

This job takes you nearer the load limit than most work on a tower does. A tub of twenty five kilos, two full buckets, hand tools and two people all add up, while class 3 in EN 1004 works on 200 kg for each square metre of deck. Spread that weight along the whole length of the platform rather than letting it all collect around your feet, and send anything empty straight back down instead of leaving it to stand up there.

The usual agreements hold otherwise. Brake the castors the moment anybody goes up, never move the tower with material or people aboard, and stop in a strong wind. That wind limit is lower on render work than you would think, because a drying breeze pulls the panel so fast that you can achieve nothing anyway. Check all four stabilisers after each shift of the tower and wind them out hard again; on this job that is the step most often forgotten, precisely because you are in a hurry.

The hazard peculiar to render is the floor under your feet. Spilt mortar turns into a hard, slick crust within a quarter of an hour, and there you are turning on it with a float in your hand. Sweep the deck clear before it sets and keep a bucket of water up top to rinse your tools in. Watch who passes below, too: a dropped float or a half full bucket is no small matter down there. The rest is at the explanation of weight on a tower.