Painting a front door? Choose the right scaffold.

Painting a front door is nearly always a solo job, with little kit and a small area of surface. The MiTower belongs with that: a one person build, 75 cm across, whose working height runs from 4.2 metres at its lowest to 6.2 at its tallest. That narrow base is the point here, because at a doorway there is seldom more than a metre and a half of footway to work from. What this model can and cannot manage is spelled out on the page for the one person MiTower.

On the deck you need only a few things at a time for door work: a tin of gloss, two brushes, an abrasive pad, a cloth and your degreaser. More would not fit and more you would not want, because at a door everything standing on the platform sits within half a metre of a wet coat. Being able to raise it single handed helps as well, since you need not round anybody up for work you take on during a free Saturday.

If the same period has to cover the window frames along the front, the bay or the timber below the gutter, you are better off if you hire a mobile scaffold, which reaches further and gives you more deck to move about on. If it stays at the door and the fanlight above it, such a build is far more tower than the work calls for. Both are weighed against one another, with the heights each is meant for, at the choice between a MiTower and a mobile scaffold.

The highest point when painting a front door is almost never in the door itself. Above the opening you usually find a fanlight, a painted lintel, a porch arch, a canopy or a lamp you have to work around. Measure to the top of that whole assembly and not to the head of the door frame. At an ordinary terraced house or a portico flat you land on 4 to 6 metres that way, and that is exactly the reach you take when you hire the MiTower.

From that figure you subtract roughly two metres to know where your deck has to sit, because that is how far you still reach above the platform. For a fanlight at five metres you stand at three. Measure from the paving slabs where the castors will rest and not from the threshold; with a porch of two steps that soon costs half a metre, and at a basement flat rather more. More worked examples sit with six metres of working height.

Hiring too low takes its revenge at a door in a tiresome way. You want to see the head of the frame and the rebate of the fanlight square on, because that is where most of the dust and most of the old paint stays behind. Stand too low and you look at it at an angle, miss an edge, and only see it once the door has dried and the daylight falls on it from the other side. One notch higher costs no extra time and saves you that recalculation.

The spot for painting a front door is nearly always public ground. You stand on the footway, in a porch or on a small landing, which means working with less room than a garden allows. Put the setup beside the frame and not squarely in front of it: the door stays usable and at the fanlight you get a head on position. Always keep a strip of pavement over, so that people passing need not step into the carriageway while you are up there working.

Look carefully at the ground, because footways are rarely flat. There is a fall towards the gutter, slabs sit askew over tree roots, and at older houses a raised landing with a step in front of it. All four stabilisers have to bear weight; a leg resting on a rocking slab is not a leg. Where there is a step, place the hired scaffold wholly on the higher or the lower level rather than half over the edge, even if that puts you half a metre further from the door.

Think further about the obstacles that simply come with a doorway: bicycles chained to the railing, a car parked tight against the kerb, a planter beside the step, the meter hatches in the wall and a doormat you would do well to lift away. Ask at your council whether the footway in your street may be used, and place the tower so that the letterplate stays reachable for the post and the courier can still get to it.

The door itself is small, but painting a front door counts a lot of stages. Degreasing, sanding, wiping off dust, filling where it is needed, priming and after that two coats of gloss, and between those coats it genuinely has to dry. For one door you therefore hire two to three days in practice, with half a morning of preparation on the first. Take in the fanlight and the surround as well, which nearly everybody does, and you arrive at three days sooner than two.

The waiting between coats is decided by the material and the weather, not by your diary. A door facing north dries more slowly; a door in full afternoon sun leaves brush marks because the gloss skins over too quickly. A day at the height of the pollen season, or one with rain hanging about, is better skipped entirely than half used. So work from the day on which you are certainly finished rather than the day on which it might just come off, and lay your rental period around it.

Your booking cushions that nicely. It is only that first twenty four hour period which carries the whole rate; and on top of it every further day comes in at 95 per cent below that, so one more drying day costs you next to nothing. Book tight and you will be standing at a door in primer watching the van pull up. Anyone who wants to work that out for a job with this much waiting in it will find it under the number of days to hire for.

The platform you hire measures 245 cm, which at a door is longer than the whole opening. That length is what lets the tower stay in one place for the entire job while you still reach the hinge side, the lock side and the fanlight without climbing down. Work the head of the frame first and come down over the panels afterwards, so that a run or a spatter lands on a surface you have yet to lay off with the brush.

Painting a front door is the only paintwork about the house that people study from thirty centimetres. They stand in front of it waiting for you to open, taking in the rebate, the corners and the handle meanwhile. Every dried drip, every bristle out of your brush and every join between two strokes is visible at that distance. That is the argument for a fixed deck rather than a step: you can move back on it and read the surface in raking light before the gloss begins to pull.

Begin at the lock. Around the handle, the cylinder, the letterplate and the bell sit years of hand grease, and no paint keys to that. Degrease that area first and abrade it only afterwards, because the other way round rubs the grease into the scratches. Choose your sheen deliberately as well: full gloss makes a door crisp and wipes clean but shows every ripple, while satin forgives more on an old panel that is no longer quite flat. From the deck you hire you see both in time.

Painting a front door brings a peculiarity with the delivery: the door you are going to paint is usually also the place where the parts get set down. So agree that unloading happens to one side of the opening rather than squarely across it, so you can still get past with a tin of gloss in your hand. Whoever books on a working day before 15:00 finds the counted set waiting the following working day, on a date they picked out themselves.

The set arrives as a counted package of loose parts and is small enough to raise on your own inside an hour. Lay the components next to the landing rather than on it, because you want the step clear for yourself and for the post. Afterwards we collect the complete set again on the day you passed on; you stack it dismantled in one place, preferably not hard up against a door that has only just been glossed.

Let the weather decide your delivery date. For gloss work outdoors you want two or three dry days in a row, so look at the outlook for that week first and only then fix your date. If it disappoints, you shift it; with a rental that is simpler than trying to finish a door between two showers. As long as you pass it on in time nothing else about your booking changes, and hiring the tower simply carries on as it was.

Door work does not load the deck heavily. Under EN 1004 this equipment counts as load class 3, which sets a limit of two hundred kilos on each square metre of the deck, and with a tin of gloss, some abrasive material and yourself you stay a long way under that figure. What it turns on here is stability on a narrow base: a one person setup on a sloping footway asks that you really run the stabilisers out and lock the castors before your foot goes on the first rung.

Never shift the setup while you are standing on it, not even that half metre from the fanlight to the side of the frame. Step off, release, roll, brake, and climb again. That sounds long winded for such a short distance, but on a footway with a fall a tower rolls away quicker than you think. In hard wind you stop outdoor gloss work anyway, if only because a wet coat then collects dust and blown leaves.

The risks that belong with painting a front door come from below. People walk past, the post arrives, and the door itself can open from the inside while you are above it. So put a note on the door and warn the household, and keep the pavement under you clear with a cone or a length of tape. Never leave tools on the guardrail above a walking route, because a brush coming down from four metres lands squarely on somebody's shoulder.