Painting a garden house? Choose the right scaffold.

For a single storey garden house you take the Altrex MiTower, a tower 75 cm wide that is rated for one person on the floor. Weight is the argument here. Opaque work means the same round three or four times over, and on each round the tower stands in different spots around the plot. A build you can roll with two hands saves hours of lifting over the week, and anyone painting a garden house alone feels that by the second round. The available heights appear under the MiTower we hire out.

More goes up with you than on a soaking finish: a tin of primer, a tin of topcoat, filler, abrasive paper in two grades, tape and a rag. That sits fine on a narrow floor as long as you hang it in a bucket from the guardrail. A wide 135 cm mobile scaffold would spare you the bucket, but a tower like that beds itself into soft turf sooner and works against you at every move. Around a garden house, handiness weighs more than floor width.

The platform length of 245 cm decides how much wall you finish from one position. On a garden house that usually means two standing places per side, and you repeat those two on every coat. Write them down during your first round, so that by the third you are not hunting for where the tower goes, nor for the spots where you laid boards under the castors. If you would rather let the timber drink instead, look at a soaked finish on a garden house, which asks fewer rounds.

For the height, do not look at the wall but at the highest piece of paint. On a garden house with a pitched roof that is the point of the gable or the top of the bargeboard, and it sits half a metre to a metre above the gutter line of the side wall. Measure that point with a long batten or a laser and write the figure down before you go and reserve. On most garden houses you end up between three and four metres.

Builds in the hire fleet are listed by working height, which is the height of the floor plus roughly 2 metres that you reach standing on it. If you come out at four metres, the four to six metre build sits comfortably and leaves margin for the part of the garden that lies lower. Measure at the point where the scaffold is going to stand, because a garden house often sits on a plinth of slabs while the lawn around it drops away.

Choosing too tight punishes you three times here instead of once. Every coat has to reach exactly the same top edge, and if you only reach that edge with a stretched arm, your cut off lands slightly differently on each round. In raking light you later see three lines stacked above one another. Take the build that puts your own eyes above the highest point, rather than your fingertips; how such a height is worked out is explained under the way working height is calculated.

Before a brush comes near it, the green growth has to go. On the shaded side of a garden house there is a thin green film that you take off with a brush and water, and that water lands precisely on the strip where your tower is going to stand. So do that cleaning round a day before the scaffold is brought, or start on the sunny side and let the wet face drain for a full day. Water sinking into turf sits there a day in dull weather.

Turf carries a one person tower perfectly well as long as it is dry. If it is wet, the four castors press into the sward and your floor is out of level within half an hour. Lay a slab or a thick board under every castor and check the stance before you climb. On moss along the shaded wall it is slippery underfoot as well, so scrub the walking route too. After a night of rain, check all four castors before you go up with a full tin.

Look at what stands against the walls too. Beside a garden house that is often a log pile, a wheelie bin, a compost heap or a row of planters you cannot simply lift. Move all of it before the van with the components pulls up, because half a metre too little at the foot of the tower means approaching that whole side at an awkward angle. If a border with perennials runs along, lay a few planks over the soil so the base plates still bed down flat.

When painting a garden house you count the rounds, not the hours. A single storey building wants a round of cleaning, a round of sanding and priming bare patches, and then two opaque coats over every wall. That is four times the same walk along four sides. In practice people end up on four to six hire days, two of which go on preparation. Reckon on two days and you are standing on day three with half a garden house painted and no scaffold.

The waiting time between coats sets your end date. Opaque paint has to harden through before the next coat can go on, and that time is printed on the tin rather than written in your diary. You also have no wish to send a fresh coat into the evening dew: a garden cools faster than a street and a shaded wall stays clammy for longer. So put your last stroke of the day on around the middle of the afternoon, certainly in spring and in autumn, and count that shortened day into the hire period.

That makes booking generously the logical move. You pay the whole rate over the first twenty four hours and every day after that is 95 per cent cheaper, so two reserve days for rain hardly weigh in your total. What a build costs per day is shown at the rental price per model. Put your collection date a day behind your final coat and you take the tower down dry, instead of pulling it apart in the rain with a van already at the kerb.

Opaque paint behaves differently from a product that soaks in. You lay a film on the timber instead of in it, so the thickness has to be even across the whole wall. From the 245 cm floor you brush a band out from top to bottom and join it to the previous one while that is still wet. Stay too long in one place and after drying you see that place again as a sheen lying slightly differently from the rest of the boarding, which no second coat repairs.

Divide the wall into bands you can finish in one go. The boards on a garden house run horizontally, but you still work in vertical strips, because that keeps the wet edge in front of you. Take two strips from each position and work from the shaded side of the building towards the sun. A second person is not needed on a wall this size, but a tin hanging from the guardrail is, so that both of your hands stay free while you are climbing between the two standing places.

Where several rounds go wrong is the joint between two days. Never stop in the middle of a wall when you knock off. Carry on to a corner, a frame or an angle bead, because a starting edge disappears there. Set the tower back on exactly the same spot the next morning and begin at that point. Before you finish, look along the wall from the side as well, since thin patches only show themselves when the light grazes across the boards at a low angle.

You put your delivery date and your collection date into the reservation yourself, and with outdoor paintwork you pick those two with the forecast beside you. Reserve by 15:00 at the latest on a working day and the delivery runs the next working day. Have the components come a day before your first painting day, so that assembly does not eat into the morning on which the timber is at last properly dry. Collecting from Zeeburgerpad in Amsterdam is possible by appointment as well and costs nothing extra.

Everything arrives as a counted set of loose parts and has to go back complete afterwards, down to the last brace. Put that stack on a hard surface and not on the lawn you have just soaked, because components with grass and mud on them travel up with you and end up in your paint. When painting a garden house at the far end of a plot, allow for carrying the parts to the back yourself, in two or three trips through the gate.

Building the tower is part of the job and you do that without us on site. A manual comes with the delivery and there is an instruction video online, and the two together get you onto the floor at this height; a quiet hour is enough for a first build. Nobody from us comes to assemble, and no standing tower is dropped off at your gate. After your last coat we collect the set again on the date you fixed, and until then it may simply stand while the paint hardens.

Under your feet is a floor that takes 200 kg per square metre, the limit belonging to load class 3 in EN 1004. Painting a garden house keeps you well under it, even with two tins and a bucket of water up there. What you do watch is that this build is meant for a single person: let whoever hands you your gear stay on the grass and haul the tin up on a line, rather than having somebody climb the frame behind you.

Lock the castors the moment the tower stands where you want it, and release them only once the floor is completely empty. Over four rounds you move often, and that is exactly when the temptation is greatest to shift half a metre while your tin is still up there. That half metre is not worth it. Do not go up in a strong wind either: in an open back garden at four metres you take more push against your back than you would ever judge from down on the grass.

The risks on this job sit in the details. A puddle of spilt paint on the floor turns glassy the moment it starts to skin, so spread an old sheet over the platform. Look at where your brush would land if it rolled off the guardrail, because the path the children use often runs right beside a garden house. Do not work on into dusk either, since no street lamp takes over the light at the bottom of a garden, and a missed drip is a missed drip.