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Use A Scaffold Tower to Paint Your House: Be Safe and Swift

While ladders are great for comic slapstick, they're not quite as useful when it comes to painting your house.

But scaffolding seems rather grand to do a bit of painting, doesn't it?

A huge team of men wrapping your house in modern art, demanding tea every ten minutes - not so! That's scaffolding ... scaffold towers are a much lovelier story.

What DIY legends need these days is an aluminium scaffold tower. Not only are they tonnes more practical, but you will also look way more professional and have something quite special to boast about down the pub.

Aluminium Scaffold Towers: Quick and Easy To Use

The UK's most respected and widely-used scaffold tower is the Boss tower, which has colour-coded click-in braces, toe-boards, wheels and stabilisers.

It's like a giant Meccano set and provides 30 - 60 minutes of kids'-toy-grown-up building pleasure.

Right, to the job in hand.

Mission: Paint Your House

Nothing makes your house look better than fresh paint. This is one of the big DIY jobs you can actually do yourself. Like anything worth doing, this is worth doing well. It's best to choose a typical English summer's day - overcast and not too hot - so that you don't burn and your paint job lasts much longer.

This is likely to be at least a weekend job. Obviously the more hands you have on deck, the less time it'll take and the more fun it'll be - maybe consider hiring two scaffold towers to do two walls at once.

House Painting Shopping List

(1) Hire an aluminium scaffold tower (41,000 people a year end up in hospital after falling off a ladder - this is a no-brainer!)

(2) A wire brush

(3) Sandpaper

(4) Water - a high-pressure water-jet would be ideal if you can get your hands on one

(5) Goggles

(6) Mask

(7) Exterior primer

(8) Exterior paint

(9) Brushes/rollers

(10) Dust sheets/old sheets (emphasis on old!): Cover everything you don't want to paint (unless you plan on painting the plants, path and neighbour's car)

(11) If you use oil-based paint you'll need white spirit to remove splodges and spills, for water-based paint, use water.

(12) A screwdriver - to remove fixtures and fittings.

(13) Big bottle of drinking water on the scaffold tower and a 6-pack in the fridge.

High Tower

If you have a two-storey house, you should hire a 5.2 metre tower. With its broad platform you can cover the largest area of wall without having to reach out and dice with death. Save your life and save time using an aluminium scaffold tower!

The Boss aluminium scaffold tower comes with an idiots' guide that you can pretend to ignore (and read thoroughly when no-one is looking). You don't need years of experience or a laden toolkit to put it together; there's no need for your neighbours to know about that though.

Cleaning

Arm yourself with goggles, mask and Marigolds (optional).

Climb up your scaffold tower and work from the top down, thoroughly clean the painting surface: get rid of flakey, peeling or cracking paint; pull out old nails; scrub mildew; fix anything that needs to be fixed. Safe on your scaffold tower you, your wire brush and flashy high-pressure hose can treat your long-suffering house to a bit of deep-cleansing attention.

Paint the Walls

... Not the car, windows, plants, path, neighbour's pond. Cover as much as you can with dust sheets or you'll spend a lot of time on your hands and knees wiping up splodges when you could be sitting back and enjoying a beer.

Buying the Paint Already!?

Yup. Get painting! Make sure you have enough paint for the area you want to cover. Get your maths hat on to work out the dimensions, not forgetting gable ends, door and window frames and gutters, so the nice man at the shop can tell you how much paint to buy. Most DIY shops will refund unopened tins, so don't be shy!

Preparation

Mix several tins together so you have exactly the same colour all over.

If the weather doesn't step up for your painting weekend and the sun makes a rare summer visit, then paint following the sun so you work in the shade and the sun will dry your wall evenly. Only take a break when you've finished the whole wall. Enter: your hired aluminium scaffold tower.

Not only will you get the painting done a lot more quickly, you'll avoid hurtling up and down a ladder, shunting the thing around and getting increasingly stressed that the paint is drying without you.

Brush or Roller?

Rollers are the way forward for big areas of wall, but use the brush to sort out the fiddly bits. Keep working from the top down, even when you have the end in sight and you're doing the fiddly bits - and the front door is drying on the grass because someone else finally offered to help out.

Painting your house is a big job, no doubt, but the satisfaction you'll both feel when it's done is well worth it. A bit of house-scaffold-owner bonding will make you happy and impress everyone else in the street to do the same.

Don't forget to take a photo of you up the scaffold tower, brush in hand and big 'I did it' grin!

About the Author

Lakeside Scaffold Hire, Essex. Managing Director Matt Browne
http://www.lakeside-hire.co.uk

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