Wallpapering walls? Choose the right scaffold.

Indoors you take the RS44 room scaffold. It is a model that belongs on a living room floor: the parts come through an interior door of about 70 cm, you carry them along the hall and up the stairs without damaging any frame, and you get the tower standing without emptying half the room first. For a round along four walls that is exactly what counts. You nudge a setup like this along dozens of times while wallpapering walls, and every kilo you are not shifting tells by the end of the day.

The outdoor models are too heavy and too unwieldy for this. A tower that stands well in the street will not go through a doorway or up a staircase, and its frame is built for heights you never need inside a house. The room scaffold stops at a reach of 3 to 4 metres, which suits practically any ceiling. What else stands ready in the way of indoor equipment you can see on the page about hiring a room scaffold.

If you are hesitating between a room scaffold and an ordinary mobile scaffold, look at your route and your floor. Through a narrow hall, over a threshold or up a flight of stairs, a compact model is the only thing that arrives intact. With the room on the ground floor and a garden door to come in by, you have more choice and could also hire a mobile scaffold you have used outside before. The difference is worked out at the choice between both types.

When wallpapering walls the highest point is the line where the length meets the ceiling, and in most homes that sits a good deal lower than people assume. In post war houses you are around 2.6 metres, in a nineteen thirties house nearer 3 metres, and in an old town house it runs towards 3.5. Measure that height on your tallest wall, because within one room it seldom varies, though between one room and the next it certainly does.

Then count back to the platform height. Above your deck you still have roughly two metres of reach before outstretched arms touch the ceiling, so the floor you stand on rarely has to be higher than half a metre to a metre. That is precisely why a reach of 3 to 4 metres is enough here and why you need not look at a bigger model when you hire. This kind of build is set out under four metres of working height.

Do bear in mind that papering is not only high work. The top thirty centimetres go on from the platform, after which you smooth the length downwards and step off to press the lower part home. A setup standing too high therefore works against you: you close the seam at the top well enough, but you climb half a metre too far at every single length. Set your deck at the height where you just comfortably reach the top edge.

The room has to be empty enough to make a circuit in when wallpapering walls. Put the furniture in the middle of the space rather than against a wall, because every wall comes up today. Roll the carpet away, lay down card or thin sheeting, and remember that castors can mark parquet if grit gets under them. A floor that is flat and dry turns shifting between two lengths into a matter of seconds rather than a small operation.

Choose your position not straight in front of the seam you are about to hang, but a little to one side of it. You need the room to let the folded length drop open and to smooth along the paper with your arms, and that does not work if the frame stands exactly on that spot. Keep a place free as well for the pasting table, the bucket of paste and the stack of cut lengths; those three you want within two steps of every position.

Before you begin, walk each wall for what is in the way. A radiator you cannot lift off, a window board, a dropped ceiling edge, a television bracket and a row of socket outlets together decide where the tower can and cannot stand flat to the wall. Switch the circuit off before you work anywhere near a socket, even if you are only unscrewing a faceplate. More about indoor work is at using a scaffold inside the house.

The papering itself is seldom what costs you days. That sits in what comes first: soaking off old paper and pulling it away, washing down glue residue, filling holes, sanding and sizing the wall. For an average living room you are busy with that for a day, and only on day two does your round begin with the first length. So when hiring for wallpapering walls reckon on two to three days, and on four as soon as it is a large room or a difficult surface.

Inside those days sits waiting you cannot possibly shorten. Size has to soak in and dry before paper may go over it, and a wall you have steamed stays damp for hours afterwards. If you are also painting in the same space, that comes on top as a separate round. Set your dates on that rather than on the hope that everything falls into place in one go, because a half papered wall is not something you can leave standing for the evening.

The rental price helps you plan generously. Only that opening stretch of twenty four hours is billed in full; from the second day onwards ninety five per cent comes off, so an extra day to finish calmly hardly registers in your total at all. Book too tight and on the collection day you still have half a wall open and have to extend after all. A day too many is always wiser here than a sharp calculation. How long people hire for this sort of work is described at the length of a rental period.

Your platform is 245 cm long, and with lengths about half a metre wide that means four of them per position. That is your rhythm for wallpapering walls straight away: hang four lengths, shift the tower one platform length along, line it up again and carry on. Do not start in the corner itself, but set your plumb line one width away from it. Your first length then hangs true and the crooked plaster in the corner does not push the whole wall out of square.

The corners you never take in one piece. You cut the length off a couple of centimetres round the corner and set a fresh plumb line on the adjoining wall, because no room corner is genuinely square. At the door and the window you work with short pieces above and below the frame, and those you cut to size only once the length is hanging. That way the pattern keeps running without you drifting out of true halfway round the room.

The closing seam deserves a decision before you cut the first length. Somewhere in the round your first and your last length meet, and that overlap always stays a little visible. Plan it above a door, in the corner behind a cupboard or on the side the daylight comes from, so that no shadow falls across it. If the ceiling in the same room is being papered too, do that first, so the ceiling seam disappears behind the top edge of the wall lengths.

The set arrives at your door as loose, counted components. Point out beforehand where that stack may lie, because in a house being cleared for papering the hall is the busiest place in the building within a day. A corner of the room you are doing last is usually handier than the passage everybody has to walk through. Stack the parts in the sequence you are going to need them and you are not hunting about while you build.

Your delivery day and your collection day you choose yourself at the booking. Reserve it on a working day and confirm before 15:00, and the components stand indoors with you the following working day, so the delivery can sit tight against your preparation. Have the room scaffold come on the day the old paper comes off: you are using it already for the steaming and the sanding, not only when the first roll goes open. Order it a day later and you are teetering on a kitchen step.

When you are done the room scaffold comes back to us. Dismantling is yours: the components go complete into one heap, preferably where they were lying when they arrived. Only do that once the last length really has taken hold, because a frame scraping past fresh paper leaves a mark that never comes out again. Allow yourself a little time for it so it need not happen at the last moment. What the bringing and fetching costs in your area is stated at the rates per province.

Indoors the wind plays no part, but the floor does all the more. On laminate or tiles a setup rolls further than you want, certainly once paste has dripped on the ground. So brake the castors before you step up and go round them again after every move. Never roll the tower along a stretch while somebody is up top or your bucket still stands on the deck, however short that stretch may look from where you are.

The structure itself can take more than this job asks of it. Under EN 1004 this equipment belongs in load class 3, two hundred kilos on every square metre of deck, and with a bucket of paste, a pile of rolls and yourself you stay far below that. What you do notice is the height of your own centre of gravity as soon as you are manoeuvring a long, wet length above your head. Work with two people then: one up who lines it up, one below who guides the length.

For the rest it is mainly watching what is wet and what is live. Paste on the platform turns it slippery, so wipe it up at once and keep a dry cloth within reach. Switch the circuit off before you take faceplates off the sockets, even though that costs you the light in the room, and keep the flex of the steamer out of the running line of the castors. Tripping over that hose happens more often than falling off a tower.