Applying spray coating? Choose the right scaffold.

For spray work on a two storey house the tower to hire is the Altrex RS51, no more than 75 cm across. That narrow width works in your favour, because you nearly always have to get past a gate, through a garden door or along the thin path between the wall and the neighbour's boundary line. Once it is round the back you also reposition it more easily on your own. The rest of the fleet appears in the overview of towers you can hire.

On the deck itself you hardly miss the extra width. Spraying keeps your arm at a distance from the surface, you move sideways from corner to corner, and very little tooling has to sit within reach. The measurement that counts is the 245 cm platform, since that is precisely the width of the pass you are working. A broader deck changes nothing about how far you reach and simply hands you more parts to carry round the back of the house before anything gets built.

The wide RS52 at 135 cm earns its keep only when a good deal has to travel up with you: buckets, a second person touching in with a brush, or a stock of masking film. Where you are repairing first and applying spray coating afterwards, that extra floor is worth weighing. For pure spray work fed by a hose from below, the narrow tower beats the wide one at every gateway on the route. The two sizes stand together in the table of tower dimensions, weights and builds included.

On two storeys the coated surface nearly always carries on right up beneath the roof edge, so that is what your tape runs to. Getting a gun there means a working height in the range of 6 to 8 metres, the deck itself landing on four to six, since a standing adult adds roughly two metres of reach above whatever the platform stands at. That figure goes on the booking, and the matching build is set out at an eight metre build.

Measure to the highest edge the gun still has to touch, rather than automatically to the gutter. Where fascia and overhang stay outside the job you stop half a metre lower and can sometimes leave a platform out of the build entirely. Measure from the level the wheels will sit on as well. If the drive falls away towards the street, your starting point lies below the front door threshold, and you hire a touch more height than the elevation appears to need.

Choosing tight punishes you faster here than in brush work. Stand too low and the top strip gets worked with your arm above your head, film thickness turns uneven, and you catch a great deal more of the mist yourself. The last metre then needs a further stand, which is exactly the interruption you were trying to avoid in the first place. One lift more costs little; a second assembly day costs plenty. Torn between two builds on a wall of two storeys, take the taller without hesitating.

Ground at the foot is claimed twice over on spray work. Four stabilisers angle outwards there, and your pump stands there too, with a bucket of material beside it that you would rather not shift at every single stand. Reckon on a strip of free, level ground that runs wider on all sides than the tower itself does. Put the pump next to the stand rather than underneath it, so moving on never begins with lifting a loaded machine out of the way first.

Check where the tower will actually stand before the parts are delivered. Slabs, a drive or a raked gravel path are fine enough; a lawn that sinks beneath the wheels after a week of rain is not. Watch for level changes between garden and terrace, and for the obstacles that live along every wall: a water butt, an outside tap, planters, a bike rack, the drain cover a stabiliser wants to occupy. Ground that runs away downhill is dealt with under uneven ground beneath a tower, remedies included.

Think about where the mist travels when you settle on a position. Overspray drifts further than most people expect, so pick a stand with no neighbour's car standing anywhere inside range, and warn the household well before you begin. Where the tower sits partly on the pavement, keep a walking route open and ask the council what your particular street allows. Sort all of that out before you hire the tower rather than on the morning of your first spraying day, with a pump already running.

Spraying a wall in passes goes surprisingly quickly. Time is eaten before and after: cleaning down, touching in bare patches, masking windows and doors, running film the whole way down to the ground and stripping the lot off later without dragging fresh coating along with it. Masking has to be neat as well, since a ragged edge shows up at once on a sprayed surface. Two to three hire days is the practical figure for a two storey terrace, masking included.

Inside those days sit waits you cannot make up. Between coats the surface has to dry, and the material decides how long that takes rather than the schedule you would prefer to keep. Weather sits on top of it: rain, hard sun on the wall or too much wind and you postpone. Plan around the day you are certain to be finished, plus a morning for clearing up, instead of the day you could in theory stop with the last pass laid on.

The way the rate is arranged helps here. It is the opening 24 hours that carry the full figure; from day two onwards 95 per cent comes off, which makes a spare day held back against poor weather nearly free. Book tight instead and you find yourself waiting on a collection van with half a wall coated. Setting an end date for a longer job is covered in working out how many hire days you need.

With a platform 245 cm long you finish a band of wall a little over two metres wide from each stand. Work that band over its full height before you do anything else at all, top down in horizontal passes that overlap generously. The only visible join then falls on the vertical line between two stands, and you put that on a corner or behind a downpipe wherever the wall allows. The more often you reposition, the more hire days it takes.

Repositioning starts at the bottom, not at the top. Switch the pump off and set the gun down before you descend, since both hands are needed to roll the tower. Then look at where the hose lies, because it must not run under a wheel or stretch tight between wall and frame. Take it along in a generous loop in the direction of travel and pay it out again only once the brakes are back on and the stabilisers are down.

What goes up with you stays limited: the gun on its hose, a cloth, some tape and a spare filter. Anything forgotten means climbing all the way back down, so run that list through in your head before you step on at all. The number of stands is nearly always underestimated when applying spray coating. Eight metres of wall already means three to four stands per coat, and a corner house adds an entire flank to that total. Bring spraying the window frames into the same visit and your hire period stretches once more.

What arrives is a loose set of frames, braces and decks, counted through and complete. Nominate a spot for that stack beforehand, since the strip beside the wall already belongs to the pump and the buckets. The drive or the front garden works well; the stretch you mean to mask that same day certainly does not. Wrap the order up on a weekday while the clock still reads before 15:00, and it reaches you on the next working day.

Choosing when the set turns up and when it leaves again is yours alone, and on spray work you read the forecast before deciding. Plan delivery for the day before your first spraying day, so you build calmly and begin masking straight afterwards. Assembly is your part: two people, no rush, manual and instruction video within reach of the stack. Pick a delivery day at the start of a dry spell, because building frames in the rain is slow going. The sequence sits in the assembly steps.

We come for the tower afterwards; you only dismantle it and stack the set complete. Do that once the coating has dried, or you glue mist onto the tubes and spend longer cleaning than breaking down. Tally the components while the tower comes apart in your hands, and the set is whole by the time it reaches the kerb for collection. What bringing and fetching costs in your province sits in the overview of delivery charges.

Towers in this fleet answer to EN 1004, load class 3, and a class 3 deck may carry 200 kg on the square metre. For spray work that is generous indeed: you, the gun and a stretch of charged hose stay comfortably beneath the figure. Where tins of material and a second person also travel up, add the whole lot together, since a charged line is heavier than the eye suggests. What the class means in practice is at this scaffold standard explained.

The standing rules apply here as everywhere else. Wheels get braked as you step aboard, the tower is never rolled with a person or a load on the deck, and work halts once the wind rises. That limit arrives sooner in spraying than in other trades, since mist then goes everywhere and settles on the very cars and windows you had kept clear. Check all four stabilisers after each move and set them out hard again before anyone climbs.

The hazard genuinely belonging to spray work is the floor beneath your boots. A platform turns treacherous once mist settles on it, so lay cardboard or film down and replace it the moment it glistens. Remember too that the hose keeps tugging at your arm and can hook behind the guardrail. Keep the zone under the platform clear, because a falling gun takes the hose down with it. Everything else that applies while applying spray coating aloft is at height work regulations.