Painting a front facade? Choose the right scaffold.

At the front of a house you seldom work on an empty surface. There is a bay below, a canopy over the door, frames with glazing bars and a downpipe that has to go along in the colour. That is why painting a front facade points at the RS52, whose deck measures 135 cm. On that width a paint kettle, a roller tray and your abrasives stand side by side and you can still get past them, even with somebody working the same stretch of wall beside you.

The usual objection to a wide model is getting it through, and that objection does not apply here. The van stops at the kerb, you carry the components from the pavement edge across to the wall, and nowhere do you have to manoeuvre through a gate or past a shed. Only at a house on an alley, or with a tree planted hard in front of the frontage, would you still take the 75 cm version. Everything else we hire out is gathered on the page about hiring a mobile scaffold.

The room scaffold and the one person MiTower both drop out for this job. The first is meant for indoor work and reaches no further than about four metres, the second stops well below the eaves of a building with three floors of living space. The front is also where somebody stands on the pavement asking questions while you are up top, and a generous deck with a second pair of hands then works more pleasantly than a little tower for you alone. Compare the dimensions of each model before you book.

The highest point when painting a front facade is almost never the top window sill. There is a gutter fascia above it, often a band of brickwork above that, and on an older building a moulding or a gable top with a hoisting beam. Measure to the edge that still gets paint and not to where the roof tiles begin. With three storeys of frontage the reach you need therefore climbs to somewhere between 8 and 12 metres, and that figure goes on your booking.

Count back from the top to know which build belongs with it. The deck you stand on ends up roughly two metres under whatever your outstretched hand can still touch, so subtract that reach from your working height and the platform height is what remains. Measure from the street level where the castors land, not from your own threshold: a footway that drains towards the gutter of the carriageway soon costs half a metre. The page on a reach of 12 metres shows what such a build looks like.

Hiring too little height only shows up on the last strip under the gutter. You end up rolling with your arms above your head, the coat goes on unevenly and paint runs back down your sleeve. Worse still: that strip is not something you touch in later from the pavement, because you have to add a deck on top and level the whole setup afresh. Caught between two sizes on a frontage of three floors, take the roomier of the two.

The ground in front of your house belongs to the council, and that is where painting a front facade begins. Put the tower on the pavement and you are expected to report that it is there, and sometimes you need a permit; put it in a parking bay and that bay has to be kept free, which you arrange with an application and usually with signs a few days ahead. Every council does this slightly differently, so ring before you fix a date.

Then look at what is in the way. In front of a frontage two square metres are seldom simply free: there is a lamp post, a waste container, a cycle stand, a thirty centimetre strip of pavement garden or a car that comes back every evening. The stabilisers splay out of the base and it is exactly those points that need clear slabs beneath them. So measure the strip between wall and kerb before you order, and always leave enough for somebody with a pushchair.

On the street side the ground itself is usually the smallest problem, though that is far from true everywhere. Pavement slabs sit askew around tree roots, a drive slopes towards the carriageway and alongside some buildings runs a band of gravel in which a castor sinks. Make sure all four castors are bearing and that nothing gives before the first tin goes open, because a tower that settles on one point only shows it once you stand on the deck. A sloping or uneven spot is dealt with at setting up on uneven ground.

A front is less work than a whole house, but a great deal more than an afternoon. First the dirt comes off and you sand the loose patches back, then you prime everything that has come bare, after that you run along the sealant joints at the frames, and only then does the first coat get its turn. For a terraced house of three storeys three to five rental days is where you end up, and with a lot of timber in the frontage that figure climbs again.

Inside that run of days sit hours you simply cannot shorten. A coat has to dry through before the next may go over it, and on the street side the weather has a heavy say: a frontage on the north side holds its damp long after a wet night, while one facing south stands too hot at midday for you to keep up with a roller. So set your closing date on the day the work is certainly done, and not on the earliest day it could in theory be finished.

In the booking that works out less dear than it sounds. Only the opening period of twenty four hours counts for the whole amount; the days you add after it come in at ninety five per cent below that, so a little slack for rain or a late colour decision adds almost nothing. Booking sharply does cost you, because then you stand at a half finished frontage waiting for the van. What a realistic period is for this kind of work is explained at the number of days you fix.

Every standing place gives you a strip of 245 cm, because that is how long the platform is that you stand on. At an average terraced house that means two to three positions for the full width of the frontage, and you walk that series again at every coat. Finish a strip completely before you move along: the top metres first and then downwards, so that spatters and drips land on a surface you still have to work over anyway.

The colour boundary asks for attention here that you never need round the back. In a terrace the brickwork simply runs on and the division with the neighbours falls in the middle of a surface or just on a rendered edge. Agree before you start where your colour stops and mask that line if there is no natural joint in it. If your setup stands half in front of the building next door, a word about that belongs there too, well before the first parts land on the pavement.

Moving along costs more time on the street side than you allow for beforehand. You take the buckets off the deck, fold the stabilisers in, check that nobody is cycling past right behind you and then set everything down firmly again. Three of those moves per coat and you have easily spent an hour. Take the window frames at the front along in the same round and the tower stands still for longer, so you get more out of every position.

The set comes out of the van as loose, counted components, and those have to go somewhere. At the front that is often harder than round the back: you do not leave a stack of tubes on the pavement overnight, and in a parking bay it is in the way the moment somebody parks there anyway. So point out a spot in advance, in the front garden, in the hall or behind a gate, and make sure somebody is at home when the driver pulls up.

The delivery day and the collection day you pin yourself. An order that comes in on working days before 15:00 is with you the working day after. Rather have the set arrive a day before you want to start painting, so the building goes at your own pace and you begin cleaning down first thing the next morning. With two people that build takes a couple of hours. If your permit for that parking bay hangs on a fixed date, keep the delivery tight to it.

The collecting is ours, the dismantling is yours: at the end of your rental period you put the complete set ready. On the street side that means stacking the parts neatly against the wall rather than spreading them across the footway, because until the van is there everybody still walks past. Run through the count while you take it down and you know for certain that nothing has ended up in the hedge or under a car. The amount that belongs with your province you can read at the rates for bringing and fetching.

Under a front there is somebody walking past all day, which makes falling tools the biggest risk when painting a front facade. A brush that comes down from eleven metres lands on a pavement where a child may just be standing. So leave nothing loose on the edge of the deck, hang your kettle on a hook inside the guardrail and close off the bottom metres with cones or tape as soon as you go up. Someone who walks round the barrier is safer than someone standing underneath to watch.

The tower itself answers to EN 1004, which places it in load class 3, so two hundred kilos is what one square metre of deck may carry. With two painters, a full bucket and a box of tools you stay comfortably below that, but do count it up once filler, primer and a jug of water go up as well. Brake the castors before you put your weight on the deck, and roll it not a metre while anybody is up top or anything is still lying there.

Wind is the second point of attention at the front. Between two blocks of housing there is often a draught you do not feel at ground level and do feel above, and then the mist off your roller carries into the street, towards parked cars and the windows opposite. Stop in hard wind, even if the wall is really dry enough to carry on with. The rest of what applies is set out in the explanation of working at height and the rules for it.