Wallpapering a stairwell? Choose the right scaffold.

The model you take out of the hire fleet for this is the Altrex RS44 room scaffold, together with adjustable legs and a stair support. Without those two extras you will never get a level floor above a flight, because the four corners of your set-up simply land on four different levels. Ask for them at the moment you reserve rather than on the morning you start, since a fully built tower with nowhere to sit is of no use to anybody at all.

That this is an indoor model shows itself in the doorways. The longest components pass through an opening from roughly seventy centimetres, which means you can bring them along the hall and in at the front door as far as the foot of the flight. From there you carry them up to the landing in armfuls, because that is where the build begins. Measure the bend if your stairs turn a quarter, since a component that jams there has to be left downstairs after all.

Hanging paper takes two hands and often two people, so you want a closed floor around you up there. Loose climbing gear on a tread is out, and you would hire a mobile scaffold for the outside of the house rather than for a landing. What the fleet holds and which model suits which job is set out on the page about the indoor room scaffolds we hire out, while this comparison of the two indoor builds covers the difference between them, width included.

The commonest mistake when wallpapering a stairwell is measuring from the half landing below. You will not be standing on that floor at all: your adjustable legs rest on the landing and on a couple of treads beneath it, and that plane is your starting point. So measure from the lowest point at which a foot lands, straight up to the top edge of your highest drop, and use that figure when you book the build you want. Write it on the wall in pencil so it is still there on delivery day.

Working height in our fleet means the height of the deck with about two metres of reach added on top, or in plain terms how high you can still smooth a length of paper with a straight arm. For a stairwell in an ordinary house that lands you between three and four metres, exactly the span of this indoor model. If you are torn between two stages, let the top edge of your highest drop settle it, and compare the figures against a build reaching four metres. One frame changes little in the build itself.

Stand too low and you are reaching over your head with a wet length towards a line you cannot see. Paper pressed home in that position hangs out of true, and the seam carries that error the whole way up the wall. You notice it once the drop is on and by then correcting it is barely possible. A build one stage taller costs almost nothing more to hire and saves you cutting a fresh length, which on a stairwell wall is never a quick job.

Your set-up ends up half on the landing and half over the stairwell void, and that is exactly why the adjustable legs matter. Each leg takes a length of its own so the floor lies level while the feet stand on different treads. Put a spirit level on it before you carry anything up and correct in small turns. Check the levelling again once the deck sections are lying on it, because that weight presses the legs down a fraction further.

The side with nothing underneath it is taken by the stair support. That goes against the string, so the load comes onto the timber of the flight rather than onto the hole beneath. Look at what the treads themselves will take: old softwood treads with a newel in the middle are not equally sound at every point. Lay a small board under each foot to spread the pressure, and you leave no marks in the timber or in the stair runner.

Empty the landing before anything comes indoors. A laundry basket, a cupboard and the bedroom doors are all in the way once the set-up is standing. Remember the light fitting that so often hangs right in the void: take it down before you begin. Wedge the doors that open onto the landing so nobody swings one into your tower. Have a look at the guidance on towers over an open stair void before the build starts, because a landing gives you less room to correct a mistake than any bedroom would.

Reckon on three hire days for an average stairwell, and four if the walls have to be filled and primed first. The opening day goes largely on building, on measuring out and on preparing the wall. Only on the second day does paper start going up, and you need the third for the last lengths, for running down the seams and for taking the tower apart. That split also leaves room for a drop you have to cut a second time.

The measuring is what eats the hours here. Every length is marked and cut separately because its bottom edge follows the flight, and between one length and the next you walk back to the cutting table on the landing. That costs a few minutes each time, and over twenty lengths it mounts up nicely. Allow for walking down the flight once per drop as well, to check the bottom edge against the treads. A lining coat that has to dry adds half a day on top.

Happily an extra day weighs almost nothing. Every hire day after the opening twenty four hours carries 95 per cent off, so keeping the tower a day longer costs very little. That suits paper hanging, where you would rather wait until a lining coat is properly dry than press a length onto a clammy wall. Book too tightly and you are pressing the last seams home while the van waits at the kerb, the one situation this job cannot take. There is more on judging that in the guide to picking a hire period.

Your working floor measures 245 cm, and that settles how many lengths you can hang from a single position. In practice it is two to three before the set-up has to shift along. Fix the order beforehand and start at the wall furthest from the flight, so you never have to slide past a fresh length. Number the drops on the back and you will never pick up the wrong one in half darkness with your hands full, which happens more than you would like on a stairwell landing.

The lengths all differ, because the bottom of each one follows the flight downwards. So strike your top line first, then measure the longest side of every drop and add generous extra. Cutting happens on the landing, on a table or a board across two trestles, and not down in the hall: that extra journey up the stairs with a pasted length under your arm is the last thing you want on this job. Keep the offcuts until the whole wall is up, because a short piece above a door often comes out of one.

Take everything you need up for each position: the cut lengths in order, your paste bucket, a brush, a sharp knife and a damp sponge. Walking down underneath a hanging drop because you forgot something goes wrong nearly every time. Work in pairs once the lengths run beyond two metres, with one keeping the bottom clear of the treads while the other presses the top home. Share those roles out before you begin, since swapping over with a wet length between you goes wrong without fail.

What gets delivered is a counted set of loose components and not a standing tower. So clear a spot first where that stack can lie without blocking the flight; a hallway is usually too tight for it, which points you to the sitting room or the garage. After that you carry everything up to the landing in two or three trips, and that will keep you busy for half an hour. Book before 15:00 on a working day and your components are loaded for the following working day.

The arrival day and the day everything may travel back are both yours to pick. Take the day before your first paper hanging day as the arrival day, because building above a void takes time: every adjustable leg has to be set separately and the stair support has to bear tight against the string. Assembling the tower stays your task; keep the manual to hand and put the instruction video on beside you. The same order appears in this stage by stage account of the build.

Once the paper is hanging you break the set-up down and stand the complete set ready on the ground floor, after which we come by to take it away. If you own a trailer you may also collect the components yourself, free of charge and by appointment, in Amsterdam at Zeeburgerpad 89, 1019 AD. Bringing the set and fetching it again is charged at one fixed amount for your province, and you can look that up in advance under the delivery charges by region.

Each square metre of the platform beneath your boots takes 200 kilos, the figure that EN 1004 sets down as load class 3. When wallpapering a stairwell you genuinely need that margin, because there are often two of you on it, plus a paste bucket and a stack of cut lengths. Add it up once before you begin, stand the bucket in the middle of the floor rather than on the edge, and lay the drops on the side you reach for them.

On this set-up the castors are not free to roll but sitting on adjustable legs, and where castors do bear they go on the brake the moment anybody climbs on. Moving happens with an empty floor only, and above a void moving means levelling again, checking again and fixing the stair support again. Never skip those steps because it is only half a metre; that is exactly when a leg ends up on the wrong tread and the floor stops being level. Shifting along is a quarter of an hour of work here.

The hazard that outranks every other one on this job is the open void itself. Anything sliding off your working floor falls all the way to the hall below, and a paperhanging knife or a pair of scissors lands hard. Keep tools in a tray rather than loose, and keep the flight beneath you empty while you are up there. Paste on a tread makes the timber greasy as well. The rest is set out under the rules that apply to work at height.