Painting a stairwell? Choose the right scaffold.

Waiting in the fleet for this job is the Altrex RS44 room scaffold, the model meant specifically for work indoors. What makes it right here is the pairing of a closed working floor with a guardrail around it and loose parts that pass through an opening of seventy centimetres. That second quality gets overlooked all the time: the whole set has to be worked in at the front door, along the hall and up the flight, and a part that sticks in the turn is no good to you at the top.

Width is not the deciding factor when painting a stairwell. You have a kettle, a roller on a pole and two brushes with you, and beyond that you mainly want room to turn while cutting along a raking wall. What you do want is a floor over the void that does not flex the moment you lean on the roller. A plank between two treads never gives you that feeling, whereas a properly built room scaffold does from the first step you take on it.

Outside the house you would hire a mobile scaffold with far more build height, but indoors a model like that stops at the first door frame. The room scaffold is the sensible choice here and you need little else, though an extra adjustable leg over a falling flight is hardly a luxury. Ask for one when you reserve. Which models are available and how they differ from one another is set out on the page about hiring an indoor room scaffold, and that page is worth a look before you settle on a build.

The ceiling over the void is the highest point of the whole job, so that point decides the build you order. The misunderstanding lies in where you measure from: not from the hall floor downstairs, but from the level your set-up will come to rest on, which is normally the landing and a few treads under it. Straight up from that plane to the ceiling is the figure you fill in when you reserve. Take a tape to it properly rather than going by the height of the storey.

Our builds are quoted as working height, which adds about two metres of reach to whatever the deck stands at. For a stairwell in an ordinary house that brings you out at three to four metres, precisely the window this indoor model occupies. If you land between two stages, choose the one that lets you cut the ceiling with a bent arm rather than a straight one. A bent arm gives you a steadier line and less paint travelling down towards your elbow. More on that arithmetic sits alongside a build that reaches four metres.

Standing too low takes its revenge on the cut line along the ceiling. With your arm straight above your head the brush shakes, you cannot see the line you are pulling and the edge comes out wavy, which in a stairwell shows up doubly because everyone looks at it from below. Paint drips down your sleeve from a raised roller as well. One stage more to hire costs little beside a line you would have to pull again, especially where the shaft carries on up to the first floor rooms.

While the ceiling is being coated, the set-up stands at its tallest right over the void, with its feet shared between the landing and the treads below. As soon as that ceiling is finished you drop back down a stage and move along one wall panel at a time. Each move costs you time, so divide the shaft into positions beforehand and sketch them on a sheet of paper. Then you know exactly how often you have to level up again in the course of the day.

Protect the flight before anything goes upstairs. A stair runner drinks spilt paint and timber treads take marks from feet and tools, so lay sheeting and tape it down as far as the skirting. Two things have to stand on the landing itself that will fit nowhere else: your kettle with the stock of paint, and the doors you intend to coat later on. Clear away the cupboards, the laundry basket and the loose belongings first, since none of it can stay once the tower is standing.

Watch the doors that open onto the landing as well. They tend to swing exactly into the space you want your set-up to occupy, so wedge them or lift them off their hinges if you are painting them anyway. How a tower is placed over an open void and what carries the load is described in this account of building above a stair opening. Read it through before the build begins, because a mistake corrected afterwards costs far more than the ten minutes of reading.

Painting a stairwell is small in square metres and large in operations, which makes the planning deceptive. Day one goes on building, masking, degreasing the walls and finishing the ceiling in two coats. Day two is for the wall panels, two coats again, with drying time between them that you cannot hurry along. Day three covers the landing doors and touching in all the edges. Four hire days is therefore the rule rather than the exception, certainly if there is filling to do as well.

The greasy band around handrail height costs extra time that plenty of people forget. At that height years of hands have left their mark, and paint simply will not key there without thorough degreasing and sometimes a bonding coat on top. Skip that step and within a few months a shadow comes back over the full run of the flight. Allow half a day for that preparation alone, and a little more for sanding the patches that still shine afterwards.

Financially those extra days barely register. The full rate covers the opening twenty four hours and every day beyond that carries 95 per cent off, so a generous booking mainly buys calm in the planning. Book too keenly and you are looking at a half finished shaft while the collection round is already due, with a coat still to go and the doors still waiting. What an average indoor job asks for is explained in this note on hire periods indoors.

Your working floor is 245 cm long, which by chance is almost exactly the width of an average wall panel in a stairwell. So you take a whole panel from each position: first the cut edges with the brush, then the middle with the roller, and only then do you move. Anybody who shifts halfway across a panel gets a visible join where the wet edge went off, and on a flight in raking light that stands out immediately from the hall below.

When painting a stairwell the panels do not run tidily from floor to ceiling. They begin in the ceiling angle and finish at the string, so each one comes out longer or shorter than the last and the bottom is always raked. Work downwards and keep the bottom edge live until you reach the string. Cut the line along the string with a narrow brush rather than tape, because tape never follows a raking timber edge tightly enough to be worth the trouble.

The band at handrail height gets taken from the same position, but with different attention. Degrease that strip over its whole length, let it dry, and only then lay your coats on, or you will get shiny patches coming through the finish. Make sure one trip upstairs brings everything you need, because every descent means sliding down past a wet wall. Stand the kettle on the deck itself and never on the edge of the guardrail, where one careless elbow tips it over the side.

A complete, counted set of loose tubes and deck sections gets dropped off at your place, and nothing more than that. Think in advance about where the pile comes to rest, because you badly need the hall and the bottom treads as your route upstairs. An empty room on the ground floor or the garage makes a better landing spot for the material. Anything confirmed on a working day before 15:00 gets loaded on the next working day and brought round to you.

When the material turns up and when it leaves again are both dates you set yourself. Set the delivery date one day ahead of your first coat, which leaves you time to build calmly, cover the flight and finish the masking. Assembly is not part of our package: that is yours to do, working from the printed manual with the instruction video running alongside. For a stairwell allow rather longer than for an ordinary room. The steps are described in this walkthrough of assembling a tower.

Once the last coat has dried you take the set-up apart and stand everything stacked on the ground floor, and we come to remove it from there. Collection costs nothing, by appointment, at our yard on Zeeburgerpad 89 in Amsterdam, so long as your own vehicle swallows the longest tubes without trouble. What a run per province costs is set out plainly under the rates for bringing and collecting, VAT included and settled before the tower ever arrives.

Your working floor takes 200 kg on every square metre, the load class 3 figure recorded in EN 1004. Doing paintwork in a shaft you never come close to that ceiling, even with somebody else beside you, but the number says more than weight alone: it belongs to a set-up braced at every point and with the deck sections locked down. Check those catches before you stand over an open void for the first time, and run through them again after every move you make.

If there are castors under your set-up they go on the brake before anybody climbs on, and the tower is never shifted while anybody or anything is still aboard it. In a stairwell that matters twice over, because the surface you would be rolling across is neither flat nor equally strong everywhere. Build up afresh once more rather than shoving a levelled tower along a tread with a kettle standing on it. Those few minutes gained are simply not worth the risk.

The real danger here is the fall beneath you. Under the working floor there is no floor at all but the hall, a full storey below, and everything you drop ends up there. Make sure nobody walks on the flight below while you are busy above, and stow brushes and knives in a tray instead of leaving them loose on the edge. Paint on a tread makes the timber slick as well. The remaining guidance sits in this explanation of safe work at height.