Impregnating brick slips? Choose the right scaffold.

For a slip clad elevation over two storeys you take the RS51, the narrow Altrex model with a 75 cm base. Narrow helps here because you are steering along the wall while deliberately holding back from it: the less you have to squeeze, the smaller the chance that a frame or a guardrail taps the slips. A chipped corner on a skin like that shows, and it is awkward to make invisible again. The range of mobile scaffolds available to hire lists the build widths side by side.

Not much kit travels up with you. A low pressure sprayer or a block brush, a bucket of fluid, a cloth for splashes on the frames and tape for masking glass covers it. The 245 cm platform sets how wide a strip you can keep wet in one go. It gets no wider than that, because anything you try to catch at full stretch lands unevenly on the wall and shows up later as a patch that drank more fluid than the strip beside it did.

Stepping up to the 135 cm RS52 makes sense once two of you share a deck, or when a few joints get pointed up while you are there. Reckon on more weight to roll along the wall in that case. A MiTower carries one person to 6.2 metres and suits a low extension or a slip clad garage, though a full house elevation runs past what that model was ever drawn for. See what a one person tower will cover before you settle on it.

If the whole elevation gets treated, your highest point is the top course of slips under the roof trim or the gutter, and your tape runs to exactly that line. Two storeys then call for a span of 6 to 8 metres. Do the sum yourself: platform height plus the roughly two metres you still cover standing on the deck adds up to working height, and that is the figure entered at booking. The overview of reaches per build sets them out clearly for you.

Go generous rather than tight on this job. Spraying with an arm stretched above your head gives an uneven film, and on a thin skin any difference in saturation comes back later as cloudy patching that only shows once the wall has dried. You want the top course roughly at eye level or just below, so the sprayer can follow every joint without guesswork. It also cuts down how often you have to shift a deck up mid job, which almost never happens when the build you hire has a little room left in it.

Your measurement starts at wheel level, not at the front step. A sunken terrace, or ground sloping off towards the boundary fence, means the build starts lower than you guessed from the pavement, and that difference has to come out of the reach you order. Think about the reveals too: they sit deeper in the face, and reaching them tidily with the sprayer wants a bit more slack above you. For an elevation carried past the first floor windows of a house, take the extra lift.

The single most important thing on a slip elevation: the tower stands completely free. You tie it into nothing, you rest no frame against the slips and you lay no plank from a guardrail across to a window frame. A slip is bonded onto board or onto insulation and was never meant to carry load. Keep a hand width of air between you and the face on purpose, and walk that gap again after every move. Anyone hiring a tower for this counts that gap into the free space needed.

Under the castors you want firm, level ground, and room all round for the four stabilisers to swing out. Alongside a slip clad wall there is often a gravel strip, a planting bed or a sunken lightwell, and on ground like that you put spreader plates down wherever the surface gives. Check that footing once more once the build is up to height. For gardens that drop away towards a fence, the method for uneven ground transfers straight to this job.

Give some thought to what stands below. Fluid running off the wall lands on the plinth, on the paving and, with a little breeze behind it, on a neighbour's car as well. Sheet over planting and glass, and agree where the bucket lives so that you never scrape a full one along the slips on your way past. Do not wedge the tower hard into a corner either, because you will need to reach in two directions with the sprayer from that last stand.

Two days is a realistic window on a house of two storeys with a plain front. On day one you clean the elevation down and let it dry; day two the fluid goes on. That drying cannot be skipped: a slip still holding moisture takes the product up unevenly, and you see it afterwards as staining around the joints. A wall that has just been washed also needs longer than the surface suggests, because the joint releases water far more slowly than the fired face of the slip does.

Weather sets the diary for impregnating brick slips. Rain during or shortly after application flushes the product out of the joint before it has drawn in, and strong sun on the wall makes it flash off far too fast. Early mornings and dry, overcast days give the best result. Since nobody can order that sort of weather to arrive on cue, an extra day on the booking beats starting at the wrong moment and ending up with a part treated elevation on your hands.

Money wise that spare day barely registers. The full charge runs over the opening twenty four hours, while every further day of the booking lands with 95 per cent taken off, so booking wide costs you almost nothing. What it buys is calm: you wait for a dry morning without having to move your end date or ring anyone. How the rental price is put together per model is shown on the page with our hire rates.

From each stand you treat a strip as wide as the deck: 245 cm. Finish that strip from top to bottom before you start anything else, and keep the edge wet where the next stand will join on. A dry edge in the middle of a panel leaves a visible line, and on a slip elevation that stands out more because the joints run in such a tight grid across the face. Land your joins on a corner, beside a downpipe or against a window frame instead.

Give the joint more attention than the slip. The slip itself has a fired skin that takes up only so much, while the joint is porous and lets water through fastest. The same goes for the sawn edges: at the reveals beside windows and doors, and at external corners, the slip has been cut through, so the open body of the clay lies there drinking. Those places want a second pass, laid wet on wet and therefore taken without a break in between the two.

Work at low pressure and hold the nozzle close to the face. You are saturating, not misting, because a fine fog never reaches the top of the joint and drifts off into the garden as well. Only leave a stand once the strip is genuinely complete, since coming back to half a panel no longer works. How impregnating brick slips differs from solid work is set out under treating solid brickwork with a water repellent.

What turns up is a scaffold in loose pieces, counted out before it left us. Pick a spot for that stack where nothing can topple against the wall, so not tight up to the slip clad plinth. A drive, or the corner of a lawn, beats the narrow path running past the house. Place the order on a weekday, leaving yourself on the right side of 15:00, and everything is waiting on your ground by the start of the next working day.

Arrival and collection dates are both yours to set. Have the set land before your washing day, since putting it up belongs to you: two people have it standing in a couple of hours, and the printed manual plus the film take you through the order of assembly. Getting that out of the way early means the tower is ready the moment conditions allow, rather than a dry morning going on frames and braces while the sun climbs.

Collection we arrange; taking it apart and stacking it is yours. Hold off until the fluid has drawn right in and you have walked the elevation in dry light, because a missed patch can only be put right properly from the deck. Make sure the van can reach the stack when you set it out for us. Booking an appointment and loading up yourself at Zeeburgerpad 89, 1019 AD Amsterdam costs nothing at all; for the other route the fixed charges per province apply.

Under EN 1004 these platforms fall in load class 3, which allows two hundred kilos across a single square metre. A bucket, a sprayer and yourself sit a long way inside that figure, so capacity is never the worry on a job like this one. Wet hands and slick soles are the real risk instead. Lock the castors before your weight goes on the first rung, and leave them locked until both boots are back down on the paving.

Move the tower empty, with no bucket and nobody aboard, and swing all four stabilisers back out after every reposition of the build. In wind you stop spraying altogether: the fluid drifts as a mist over the boundary and the coverage on the wall turns patchy where the breeze catches it. While rolling, watch that nothing scrapes along the slips, because a frame catching the face will take a corner off a slip and that will not be repaired invisibly.

Impregnating fluid is thin and travels further than paint. Wear gloves and eye protection, keep it away from your face when spraying upwards, and wipe spills off the deck straight away or it turns treacherous underfoot. Let nobody walk under the tower while the sprayer is running, and set something out as a marker if need be. What else applies up a scaffold, even on a job lasting a single day, is gathered at the rules for working at height.