I?m going to paint the upstairs windows of my house. They?re at standard first floor height and there?s a fair bit of work to be done on them.
I?m wondering whether a normal ladder is fine for the average DIY'er or if I should invest in something more substantial? I previously lived in a flat so didn?t have this problem.
Obviously a scaffolding tower would be more secure while working, but would be much more expensive & I?d have to take the risk of reselling it or the cost of hiring for several weeks. I'm also slightly nervous about having it at the front of the house for a couple of weeks.
Any guidance would be much appreciated.
Michael
A third way that someone very helpfully put on my old house, presumably when they added a 'conservatory', was to embed some lengths of angle iron in the wall below the windows. One just had to feed a scaffolding board out and hop on. Lots of very old buildings have holes left at regular intervals in the walls, for beams and boards to be assembled as an ancient form of scaffold. Some simple such arrangement below the windows of modern buildings would be a very useful design feature for the ladderably challenged - except of course that many of us now have reversible windows or can simply take them right out to make painting easier...
And a fourth way, of course, if you adopt the remove and paint approach, you can then simply lean out (suitably tethered) to scrape and paint the frames (helps if you are ambidextrous). Now we have power screwdrivers, I generally find this the easiest way, esp as I can take the sashes themselves into the garage to work on, on the bench, in the dry; dunk the hinges in paint stripper; minimise drips and runs etc. One has to take care to mark which sash goes where and not to drop them when replacing, of course.
(Above the 'conservatory' there were also angle irons and cross boards on the edge of the roof, just in case any tiles slid off and would otherwise have gone through the 'conservatory' roof. This was all very well, until the boards themselves needed painting, and I took them off in the end as it was easier fitting new panels on the 'conservatory' than maintaining the boards on the roof!)
S