Cleaning a veranda? Choose the right scaffold.

Cleaning overhead is one-person work with a bucket within arm's reach, which is why you hire a mobile scaffold as slim as the Altrex MiTower: 75 cm across, meant for a single user and light enough to nudge half a metre along on your own. On this job you nudge it a great deal, far more often than on paintwork, because you clean one bay between two rafters and then have to move on again. How that model is put together is set out under the MiTower we hire out.

The width counts for more here than it appears to. A veranda is often closed along its open side with sliding glass, and between that wall and the first post very little room is left over. A narrow set-up passes down that gap without anybody having to lift a panel out of its track. Put a broad tower in there and the last bays against the glass stay out of reach, leaving you on your knees fiddling with a pole, which is exactly what you meant to avoid.

What you need on the deck is modest: one bucket of suds, another of clean rinse water, a soft bristled brush, a chamois and a squeegee. That stands side by side on a single platform. Only when two of you work, one brushing while the other follows behind, is it worth hiring something broader from the full range of mobile scaffolds. For an average veranda behind the house the narrow build is ample, even across two days of hire with a bucket in each hand.

The soffit of a veranda is not equally high everywhere. At the house end the wall plate sits at the top and from there the roof falls away towards the front beam, so the furthest point above your head is at the wall junction. Measure there, and an ordinary lean-to brings you out at four to six metres of working height. Two of those metres are what your arms add above the deck; the rest is platform height. The page on a reach of six metres shows which build belongs to it.

Take your measurement from whatever the castors will rest on, and on this job that is nearly always the veranda floor itself. Where there is a sunken light well, a raised platform or a step up to the terrace, take the lowest floor you will genuinely be standing on. Do not forget that cleaning asks for less reach than laying a coating does: you want the rafters at eye level, because that is the only way to see precisely where the film is still sitting.

Building too tall works against you here. Get your shoulders right under the soffit and you can no longer draw the brush along a board in one straight sweep, so you end up scrubbing in short, uneven movements. When cleaning a veranda, stay half a metre below the lowest point of the roof directly above your set-up. Anyone who also wants the wall above the lean-to should look their height up for the first floor of the house and pick a different model with more stages in it.

On this job the set-up almost always stands inside the veranda, which means the castors rest on the floor you still intend to clean. That does no harm as long as you keep the order: soffit first, then the glazed wall, and the floor at the very end. Do check that the paving lies flat and that nothing rocks, because a tipping slab under a castor announces itself only at the moment you are up there hauling on a pole with both hands.

Empty the garden room before the tower is delivered. The dining table, the chairs, the outdoor rug, the planters and the loose cushions all go out; whatever stays behind gets wet and stands in your way the moment you shift position. Look as well at where the water travels. Suds dripping off the soffit gather in the lowest corner of the floor, and ending up with your castors in a puddle is no fun at all on a composite deck.

For the outside of the front beam you roll the tower out of the veranda, onto the terrace or the lawn. Open the stabilisers out there and set them down on something solid, because turf softened by your rinse water simply gives way under a foot. If the garden falls away towards the back, adjust the feet until the set-up stands plumb again; how that is done is covered in this guide to ground that is not level, and it is worth reading before the tower goes out onto grass.

Cleaning a veranda looks a quicker job than it turns out to be once you are under it. A boarded soffit is dozens of joints, and every joint holds dust that has to come out with a brush before anything is made wet. Cobwebs only release if you vacuum them or sweep them away dry; go straight over them with a wet brush and you smear grey streaks along the whole length of the board. Allow half a working day to a full one for the soffit alone, depending on the rafters and the depth of the structure.

Two hire days is a sensible choice for a normal veranda. On day one you build, vacuum dry and do the soffit with its rafters; on day two the glazed panels follow, then the bottom track and finally the floor. Working in full sun, your suds dry on the glass before you can pull them off and you are left with streaks, so push those faces towards the early morning or towards a cloudy afternoon instead.

Booking a little wider costs you very little. Your first twenty four hours carry the whole charge; each day you add behind it is reduced by 95 per cent. A reserve day for wet weather, or for a soffit grubbier than it looked from below, is therefore arranged in a moment. It saves you a rushed final morning as well. What counts as a realistic period is set out in this look at how long people keep a tower.

Begin at the top and begin at the wall. The wall junction is where the least air passes through and where cobwebs, dead leaves and dust have built up for years, usually behind a cover fillet or just above the fixing of the wall plate. Work from there in bands towards the front beam, rafter by rafter, so that everything you loosen falls in the direction you still have to deal with. Going the other way round means cleaning a veranda bay twice over, which nobody has time for.

Per set-up a deck of 245 cm brings roughly one bay between two rafters within reach, plus the junction with the boarding beside it. Vacuum or sweep that bay dry first, go over it with a lightly soaped brush and follow with a clean cloth. On a boarded soffit always follow the run of the boards; working across them pushes dirt into the joint, and it reappears later as a dark line you will have to open up again.

Once the soffit is finished the glazed panels and the bottom track come round. Do the glass from the top downwards so dirty water never runs over a pane you have already cleaned, and scrub the track out afterwards, because it holds a mixture of sand, leaf and algae that makes the sliding wheels heavy and damages the track in time. The veranda floor closes the sequence, since everything loosened above it lands there sooner or later, and rinsing it last means rinsing it only once.

Your tower turns up as loose parts that can be counted through. Agree in advance where that stack may be put down, and keep the path to the garden door clear, because you will be walking along it with full buckets for days. A corner of lawn or the side of the terrace works perfectly well. If your reservation is in on a weekday before 15:00, everything stands in the garden ready to build on the next working day, stacked where you asked for it.

Assembly is yours to do. Put the tower together on the terrace and only then roll it into the garden room, because under a roof there is no longer headroom to tilt a guardrail frame upright. Do that building on dry ground as well, so you are not starting with mud packed under the castors. The manual comes in with the parts and the video takes you through the sequence, step after step, before you climb anything, and it is worth watching once through in advance.

Arrival and departure are two dates you choose yourself during the booking. After your last round of cleaning we come for the material; you make sure the tower is broken down and lying complete. Do that at a moment when the floor has dried out, or you drag wet tubes over freshly scrubbed tiles and begin again from the start. Delivery is settled per province, and those amounts sit under the charges for each area we cover.

Everything in our fleet is built to EN 1004 and sits within load class 3, which means a square metre of deck takes 200 kg. For cleaning work that is generous even with two full buckets aboard, though water weighs more than people expect and ten litres is already ten kilos. With two of you up there and a vacuum on the deck as well, run the sum through once. The standard itself is explained under the meaning behind that scaffold standard.

Set the brakes before you step onto the first rung, and never roll the tower away while buckets or a second person are still aboard. That is a real temptation when cleaning a veranda, precisely because each move is only half a metre. Standing outside the structure to reach the front beam, keep an eye on the wind as well: on an open terrace a deck hatch catches far more of it than you had grown used to under the roof.

The hazard on this job is simply getting wet. Suds running down your arm reach the deck and turn it greasy, so put an old towel down there and wring it out regularly. Watch the lighting that is often built in between the rafters too, and switch that circuit off before you take a wet brush past a fitting. Wet soles on a wet deck are how most falls on a cleaning job start, and a towel costs you nothing. The remaining rules are gathered under the rules for safe work at height.