Staining a veranda? Choose the right scaffold.

Stain on a veranda is work for one pair of hands: a kettle of stain, a brush with a broad head, a cloth and nothing more. The Altrex MiTower suits that, a light scaffold 75 cm wide set up as a single user model. Between the posts of a veranda there is usually about two and a half metres of gap, and at that width you roll straight through without any puzzling over angles. What the model handles is explained on the page about hiring a MiTower.

Weight counts for more here than floor area. When staining a veranda you shift along one beam at a time, and you do that dozens of times a day with nobody coming to help carry. A heavy scaffold with a roomy deck means taking the kettle down at every move, pushing, and then lifting everything back up again. With a narrow single user model you often take brush and kettle up in one hand, set the stand a beam further on and climb straight back.

If you also want to tackle the elevation above the extension in the same week, this model falls short and you instead hire a mobile scaffold that carries on upward; the sizes appear in the overview of mobile scaffolds. If it stays with the veranda itself, with a roof surface starting at the wall and falling away to the front rail, the one person tower puts you everywhere you need to be and extra height gains you nothing at all.

The highest point of a veranda sits against the house. That is where the roof surface begins, and from there it falls to the front rail, so you measure at the wall plate and not at the front. On an ordinary garden extension the figure comes out between 4 and 6 metres of working height. Above the deck you count roughly two more metres that your arms add; what is left underneath is the platform height in your booking. The page on six metres of reach shows the matching build.

Where you start measuring is worth half a metre here. With the scaffold on the veranda floor you measure from those slabs; move it onto the grass or the terrace alongside to do the outside of the front rail and your starting point drops by a step. In that case take the lower of the two floors as your basis, because you hire one build and not two. Write both figures down before you reserve, and you need not walk the garden again with a tape.

On this job you can also sit too high. With the deck too close under the roof boards you can no longer stand upright and you stain the tops of the beams by feel. Set it too low and you cannot reach the end grain on the outer edge without stretching, and that is precisely where the stain has to soak in deepest. So pick a build that leaves a hand's width above your head and still lets your arms swing outward.

On this job the stand usually goes inside the veranda, on slabs, hardwood boards or a composite floor. Look first at whether that floor can take the weight of a scaffold with a person on it, point by point. Loose terrace slabs bedded on sand will tip under a wheel, and a timber deck with a sagging joist gives the moment you lean out at the top of the tower. Lay a couple of stout planks under the wheels if need be, to spread the pressure over more surface.

Inside a veranda there is a good deal of furniture that has to come out first. The table and chairs, a lounge seat, planters against the posts, a barbecue and the little lights strung from the rafters that you have to duck past. Watch the step between the veranda floor and the terrace outside as well: that difference of one slab shows itself the moment you try to roll the tower over the lip and a wheel catches. Lift the stand over rather than forcing it across.

For the outside of the front rail you take the scaffold out, and then you are often on grass or on gravel. There you genuinely need the stabilisers, and you set them on a pad that will not sink under the load. How a stand is kept steady on ground like that is described at bracing and anchoring a mobile scaffold. If the garden slopes towards the fence, correct it with the adjustable feet and not with a pile of slabs.

On this job the time goes mostly into preparation. The strip of timber that projects beyond the roof surface has to be rid of grey fibres, which means brushing, a light sanding and letting it dry before anything goes on. The part sheltered under the roof needs no more than a proper cleaning. Those two operations run into one another because they meet on the same beam, and that is why a veranda moves along more slowly than the square metres would suggest.

So allow three to four days with the scaffold in place. Day one is for assembly, brushing and sanding, and after that come two rounds of stain with a day between them. Stain goes on thin, wet in wet over the full length of a beam, and it has to sink away properly before the next coat means anything. In cool or damp weather that takes longer than the label promises, and you cannot claw the gap back later in the week.

A generous plan costs little extra at the hire counter. You settle one full day when the tower arrives, and every extra day of stain weather behind it costs ninety five per cent less. Setting a spare day against a wet spell is therefore cheaper than stopping halfway through the second coat because your period runs out and the van is on its way. How long to take such a hire is set out in the guidance on how many days a job needs.

Before you start staining a veranda, look at where the line runs between dry timber and weathered timber. That line rarely coincides with the roof edge: rain blows in at an angle, so the first two beams inside the edge have suffered as well, while the timber deep under the roof surface is still close to original. The difference shows most clearly on the tops of the beams and on the end grain, and those faces you judge from the deck rather than from below.

The front rail deserves separate attention, because on most verandas the gutter is built into it. You are then staining right up against an aluminium or plastic gutter edge, and you do not want to carry that along with you. Mask that edge over its whole length before you go up, so that from the platform you can pull a full brush through without braking every few centimetres. Check at the same time whether leaves are lying in the gutter, because a brush will otherwise drag them straight through the fresh coat.

The wall junction is the third zone. There the timber meets the masonry and there is often a lead flashing or a cover batten, and on that transition damp lingers longest. With a deck of 245 cm you have roughly one beam plus the junction around it within reach, and then you move on to the next bay. Work each bay right through from one stand, from the wall out to the front rail, so that no lap mark shows along the length.

The scaffold reaches you as a countable stack of tubes, decks and guardrail sections. Think beforehand about where that stack may go, and it is not the veranda floor, because there you want a clear run. A strip of grass or the path beside the extension works better. A weekday booking placed ahead of 15:00 puts the parts in your garden on the next working day, so you can safely have the delivery a day before your start date.

Building it is then your work. A scaffold of this size goes up in about an hour and one person can manage it. The manual that arrives with the parts, together with the instruction video, walks you through the order. Put it together outside the veranda by preference and roll it in afterwards, because under a roof surface there is no room to tip a guardrail section upright. Bear in mind while building at what height the roof boards begin, so you are not rehanging a deck halfway.

You choose the day of delivery and the day everything goes away again. Afterwards we pull up to collect the parts; you strip the scaffold and lay the pieces complete back on the same spot. Do that only once the last coat of stain is genuinely dry, or the tubes will stick to your work. What the run out and back costs is tied to your province, and those figures are at the cost of delivery and collection.

Our towers follow EN 1004 and belong to load class 3, which comes down to 200 kg for every square metre of deck. With stain you are miles under that, carrying only a kettle and a brush. Even so the limit is worth knowing the moment somebody climbs up with a second bucket, or you set a tool box down on the platform beside you. What the standard covers is explained at the explanation of the scaffold standard.

The ordinary rules apply in an enclosed garden room too. Tighten the wheel brakes before you take the first rung, never roll with a kettle of stain or a person aboard, and stop outdoor work the moment it starts to blow hard across the garden. Under a roof you forget that last one quickly, but the moment you step outside with the stand to do the front rail you are in the full wind, and an open deck hatch behaves like a sail.

What really goes wrong on this job is a low roof combined with a slippery floor. Drops of stain on a deck make it treacherous, so lay cardboard down and replace it once it has soaked right through. Watch out as well for the rafters and the light fittings above your head at the moment you straighten up out of a stooped position. What else has been agreed is collected under the rules for working at height, and it is worth reading before the first coat rather than after it.