Painting stairs? Choose the right scaffold.

For painting stairs you take the Altrex RS44 room scaffold out of the hire range, our model for indoor work. From a doorway of about 70 cm the loose parts still pass through, and that is the measurement that counts the moment you have to carry them along a corridor into the hall. A staircase rarely stands in a generous entrance hall. Usually it is a narrow through route with a door to the living room, a door to the meter cupboard and a coat rack taking up half the wall.

You do not need much platform area on this job. You work close in with a tin, a brush and sometimes a small roller on a face that hangs at an angle over your head, so you stand still and reach only a short way. What you do need is a working floor that does not move the moment your arm pushes against a tread. So do not count on loose climbing gear, but on a hired build you put up once and then leave standing for the week.

You would hire a mobile scaffold for a facade outside, but indoors that model is beside the point for a staircase. It will not come through the front door and you do not need that much reach indoors anyway. A trestle drops out as well the moment you have to stand under an open flight, because there you want a rail around you and a floor you can shift as a whole. The indoor builds are listed on the page about room scaffolds in the hire range.

The highest point on this job is seldom on the staircase itself. On an open flight it is the underside of the top few treads, and on a closed one the upper edge of the string where it runs into the stairwell opening. Measure from the hall floor, because that is where the castors go, and measure to that point rather than automatically to the ceiling of the hall. In practice that saves you half a metre of build, which is often the gap between two settings on the hire form.

Deck height and roughly two metres of reach together make the working height, which saves you judging what an outstretched arm still reaches. At an ordinary storey height in a house, painting stairs puts you at three to four metres, which is exactly the range of this indoor model. Within that range, pick the setting that brings the sloping face square in front of you instead of somewhere overhead. The matching build is shown at four metres of working height.

Anyone standing too low feels it in the neck. Half a metre short and you paint the underside with your head tipped back, missing the joins that will be obvious from the hall floor later. On top of that, paint runs down the brush towards your wrist as soon as you work above shoulder height, and those drips end up on a tread. Take the setting that puts you a little higher, certainly on a flight running up to the first floor.

The build goes in the hall, under or beside the staircase, and that is the tightest space in the house. Clear the coat rack, the shoes and the cupboard under the stairs first, and check which way the meter cupboard door swings. On every side the four splayed feet claim their own piece of floor, including the side where the front door opens inwards. So measure that hall before you reserve, from wall to wall and not from skirting to skirting.

Then look at the floor. A hall often has tiles, laminate or boards with a runner, and the castors of a build press marks into all of them. Lay hardboard or a piece of dust sheet under the castors and the foot plates, and lift it along when you move rather than dragging it. Watch the threshold to the living room and any hatch in the floor as well, because you cannot simply roll over either of them.

Keep the route up the stairs free as well. You are coating the treads alternately, so the household walks past your build on the way up while you are working. Put the room scaffold against the side of that route and do not leave your tin and tray on the bottom treads. A bucket left on a tread is exactly what somebody steps into in the dark on the way to bed. How a build is placed beside such an opening is set out in the piece on a tower at a stairwell opening.

Coating in alternate rounds sets your hire period. You do one row of treads, let it harden and only then take the treads in between, because otherwise nobody can get upstairs. That is two rounds with a wait in the middle that no amount of effort will shorten. For an ordinary house staircase that puts you at three to four hire days, and at rather more as soon as a second flight up to the loft is in the plan as well.

The underside and the strings are done in that same period but at different moments. Nobody walks on those faces, so you schedule them for the day the treads are hardening and the flight is out of bounds anyway. After that comes the final coat on the walking treads, alternate again, this time with anti slip stirred in. All those steps together mean the hired room scaffold stands in your hall for several days running, and on this job that is not waste.

That weighs less than it sounds. Only day one is charged at the full rate; whatever you attach to the period after that goes through with 95 per cent off. An extra day to let a coat harden quietly therefore costs you very little, while a period cut too fine means the collection van turns up beside a half finished flight. How long other people keep an indoor set is described in this piece on hire periods.

With 245 cm of platform length you clear a good stretch of string or underside from a single setting. Stand the build parallel to the outer string and your brush follows the diagonal, so you only move on when you have reached the end of those two and a half metres. The fewer settings you need, the fewer joins end up in a continuous face, and joins in gloss are exactly what shows from the bottom of the flight in the afternoon.

Collect everything that has to go up before you climb: the tin, two brushes, a cloth and fine abrasive paper for the transitions. Under an open flight there is nothing to stand anything on, so hang your pot on the guardrail of the hired build and keep the floor clear for your feet. Every trip down to fetch something means an edge somewhere is starting to set, and in raking light that will be visible in the face later.

The treads themselves are not done from the build but standing on the flight, from the top down and every other one. Finish the strings and the underside completely before you start that final coat, so you never have to step over fresh anti slip to touch something up. For the handrail and the balusters you use the same build, only a setting lower, sliding it up along the string as you go. Nothing about that calls for a second hire.

Everything reaches you as a pile of loose parts, counted through against the delivery note. Work out in advance where that stack can go; the staircase is out, because you have to pass it for the whole period. A cleared living room or the garage is better, so the hall itself stays free for the build that goes there. A weekday reservation closed off before 15:00 has the parts indoors the following working day, which for stair paint is early enough.

Two dates are yours to fix in the booking: the delivery and the collection. Take the day before your first coat as the delivery date, so you build without haste and can start the following morning. Assembly is your own job; a printed manual lies in with the parts and a video shows the sequence. In a narrow hall this is work for two people and takes about an hour, because every part has to be turned around the staircase. See also this step by step build plan.

Once the work is done we drive back to take the set away. Break the build down and stack the parts complete on the ground floor, preferably inside and dry, because a wet stack is not what you want to hand back. Count the frames and braces as you go, so nothing stays behind under the staircase for us to find missing from the set. What a run out to your province and back comes to is listed at the delivery charges per province.

A deck built to EN 1004 carries a load class. Class 3 is the one here, good for 200 kg on each square metre. With stair paint you come nowhere near that limit, since you, a tin and a few tools weigh very little between you. What the class says beyond weight concerns the build as a whole: braced through, supported at four points and able to take the sideways push you keep giving it under a sloping face.

Brake the castors as you step on and leave them braked until you are back down. Move it empty: no person and no material on the deck, not even for that half metre to the left. Wind plays no part indoors, but a front door blowing open pulls a strong draught through a narrow hall, past your wet paint and past the build, so put that door on the latch before you climb. The same goes for an open window on the landing.

The hazard on this job is below you. Anything that leaves the working floor bounces on down to the tiles in the hall and sometimes into the stairwell opening. Let nobody walk under the build while you are up there, and agree that the household calls out before coming past you on the way up. Fresh paint on a tread is slippery in its own right, so mark the rows you have done. The remaining points are collected in these guidelines for work at height.