Painting a veranda? Choose the right scaffold.

Paintwork inside a garden room is usually a solo affair, with a kettle of paint, a block brush and a small roller all within arm's reach on the deck. That suits the Altrex Mi Tower: a 75 cm wide version meant for one user, which you roll a bay further along without calling anyone over. On a lean-to with five or six bays between the rafters that saves you hours of walking back and forth over a painting week. The build positions are set out on the page for this single-person tower.

What really earns this model its place when you are painting a veranda is that the deck can be hung at several heights without ordering a different type of tower. Under a sloping roof surface you need exactly that: high against the house wall, then a notch lower just behind the front beam. On a wide frame such an adjustment costs more lugging about, and width does you no favours in any case, because you work down one purlin at a time with a single arm.

The model tops out at 6.2 metres of working height and starts at 4.2, so it stops where the wall above the veranda begins. If the brickwork over the roof is due for paint in the same period, the sensible step is to hire a mobile scaffold with more build height; the sizes sit in the range of taller towers on offer. Stay inside the garden room, boarding overhead, rafters and posts down to the floor, and the one-person version reaches everything.

A veranda roof lies at an angle, and the whole height question turns on that. At the wall plate against the house you have the most room over your head, while the boarding towards the front beam sometimes drops half a metre. Set the deck at one height for the full depth and you will stand at the front with your shoulders against the panels. Take two measurements instead, one at the wall and one just behind the front beam, and write both down before you book anything.

Outside the structure you have to reach between 4 and 6 metres, taken as working height from the floor the castors rest on. Roughly two metres of that is the reach you have above the boards; whatever is left is the platform height you pass on when you reserve. Inside the garden room you then drop the same build to a lower setting, which is a quarter of an hour of work. What the frame looks like is shown on the page for a six metre build.

Stand too high and your brush no longer meets the boarding at a right angle, so you drag streaks that an opaque coat shows up at once. Stand too low and you paint with a stretched arm above your head, paint runs down your sleeve and you cannot judge the cover from underneath. Keep something like half a metre between the crown of your head and the panels, and reset the deck once more rather than working bent over all day.

The garden room empties out before you start. A dining table, chairs, a lounge set, the outdoor rug and the planters along the posts all go elsewhere, because you need the full floor to shift the tower bay by bay and you would rather not find paint on your cushions. Anything that cannot leave, a built-in bench or an outdoor fireplace, gets sheeted down to the ground with the top edge taped, or the first gust lifts it off again.

Then look at the floor itself. Loose terrace slabs bedded on sand can tip under a castor, and a timber floor with a sagging joist beneath it springs the moment you lean forward high up. Slide a couple of planks under the wheels where that happens, and roll the tower slowly rather than dragging it across an uneven joint. Sheet the floor over the whole width you are treating as well, because opaque paint drops further than stain does and a spatter on a pale slab never quite comes out again.

The outside of the front beam, along with the exposed end grain, gets done from the terrace or the lawn instead. Swing the stabilisers out there and slip a board or a slab under each foot, so that a leg does not quietly settle into the ground while you are up top with a brush. Where the garden runs off, correct it on the adjustable legs and not with a stack of loose slabs; the guidance on steadying a mobile scaffold covers that.

Putting a veranda into paint is a job of layers, and layers cost days on your hire period. After the sanding and degreasing comes a primer that has to reach everywhere, the end grain and the underside of the boarding included, and after that two opaque coats over the lot. Every layer has to harden before the next one means anything; rush it and the paint drags under your brush and lifts the round before it. That is not something you put right at the end.

So count on the tower standing in your garden for four to six days. Day one goes on assembly and preparation, and from then on a round follows every other day, with the deck reset between the wall and the front beam. Damp weather or a cold night stretches those gaps, and in autumn an afternoon of dew on the timber is enough to lose a day. Plan with the date you are sure of rather than the date it would be finished on if everything went your way.

Happily the way the days are counted makes a generous period affordable. The opening 24 hours are the only ones charged in full, while each further day of the hire is reduced by 95 per cent, so two spare days tacked on behind a paint job cost next to nothing. Book too tightly and you are forced to stop halfway through a coat and leave the rest of the veranda bare. Judging a sensible span beforehand is the subject of the piece on how many days to book.

Before a lid comes off a tin, judge the old coat from the deck. Almost every veranda has been stained at some point, and opaque paint grips badly on timber still full of oil or wax. Press a strip of masking tape down hard in three places and pull it off: if stain comes away with it, there is more sanding to do. Rub a cloth with white spirit over a purlin as well, because a brown stain on that cloth tells you your new paint will let go in a year.

After that, work consistently downwards. Start on the underside of the boarding and the ceiling work, carry on to the rafters and the purlins, and finish at the posts and the skirting. Everything you drop from above lands on a surface that has yet to be done, and a spatter on a fresh opaque layer can never be polished out invisibly. With a deck of 245 cm you cover roughly one bay between two rafters per position.

Within that bay, keep an eye on the wet edge. Opaque paint skins over faster than stain, so you lay a purlin out in one movement and do not break off halfway through its length. Reposition the tower only once the bay behind you is complete, then move on to the next pair of rafters. After each round, walk the underside of the boarding with a lamp: that is precisely where nothing shows from the floor below, and a thin patch stays hidden until a summer evening sun slants underneath and picks out every join.

The scaffold turns up as a countable set of separate parts. Point out a spot where that stack can lie for a week without being in the way, along the fence or on a corner of the lawn, and certainly not on the path you will be carrying tins of paint, rolls of sheeting and a sander along. Any order placed on a working day ahead of 15:00 reaches you the following working day, which lets you start straight away.

Erecting it is your share of the work when painting a veranda. Two people have a set-up of this size standing inside an hour, with the printed manual and the video to show you which part goes on when. Put it together outside and roll it into the veranda afterwards, because a guardrail frame cannot be tilted upright under a sloping roof surface. While you build, settle straight away which deck height you want at the wall and which one behind the front beam.

You fix yourself when the delivery happens and when everything is collected again. Once the last coat is on we drive out for the parts; you take the tower apart and stack it complete where it was unloaded. Wait for the paint to cure properly instead of trusting a surface that only feels dry, or a tube presses itself into your work. What the run to your province costs is listed on the page of delivery and collection charges.

Everything we send out answers to EN 1004, in the class 3 bracket, and that bracket permits a spread load of 200 kg per square metre. Paintwork never comes near that ceiling, not even with a ten litre tin, a roller on a pole and a toolbox alongside. It is still worth knowing the figure for the moment somebody climbs up to mask off while you carry on with the brush. The rest of the wording is unpicked in the article about this standard for towers.

Beyond that, nothing changes about the familiar rules. The wheel brakes go on before anybody climbs aboard, you never shift the set-up with a tin of paint or a person still on it, and you stop the outside work once the wind gets up, because dust then blows straight into your wet layer. Check at every new position that the stabilisers are bearing properly again, particularly when you alternate between slabs indoors and soft ground outside, where a foot can sink without anyone noticing from above.

The particular risk here sits in the ceiling work. Rolling paint above your head sends some of it back down, onto the deck and onto your shoes, and paint makes a platform every bit as slippery as water does. Lay cardboard over it and swap that out once it is soaked. Wear goggles too, since a drop of opaque paint in your eye is not easily rinsed away. The rest is gathered in the rules for work at height.