Anybody???! Where's Mr Bone when you need him?! ;-)
David
Stabiliser is thinner and more penetrative but you can end up using gallons of the stuff without any apparent improvement. Unless you have damp problems I'd use PVA diluted at 1:4, which will stay closer to the surface and may even form a film after a couple of coats. Whatever gives you a surface that doesn't suck in the first coat of paint is the one you need.
"stuart noble" >> pressure-washed the whole thing, much of the old paint and pebbledash
Thanks a lot for the advice, Stuart. Have duly drenched the house in dilute PVA and am now well underway with the paint, which seems to be taking well (although time will tell, I guess!)
Anyway... I now need to buy myself a new set of ladders, as the current set (bought for a previous home) won't quite let me reach the eaves, and at that height from the ground I'm not going to take any daft risks. Question: given that the height of the eaves (ie the highest point I need to get my paintbrush to) is 7 metres from the ground, what minimum length of ladder do I need to buy? Just to be clear, this is the apex of a 7m high, flat vertical end-wall of the house.
Should I be going for a double or triple extending ladder? As far as I can see, the disadvantage of the former is that unless you have a megabucks trade version with pulleys, it will be too long to extend safely and easily; am I right? Will it flex more than the triple?
I expect someone's going to tell me a need a tower to be safe; really want to avoid the expense of that if I can! To be honest I don't know how I'd install a tower either, given constraints of the location.
Second reason for the second ladder is that I also need a roofing ladder at the moment; my plan was therefore to obtain one of those gizmos you attach to a regular ladder, (eg
Yes, I've considered hiring, but I will use this kit again occasionally in the future and it makes economic sense to buy. Also, it will be very much for weather dependent use, and IME as soon as you contact HSS to hire any fair-weather tool, it's a cue for the heavens to open!
TIA David
Didn't get any replies about the roofing hook, so I went ahead anyway and bought the above-described device from Screwfix, and thought it might benefit others if I posted my experience!
First thing is that if anybody HAD responded, they'd probably have pointed out that roofing hook attachments don't work well with a conventional extending ladder; they work best with a single length of ladder. Reason is two-fold.
Firstly, imagine an extended ladder lying flat - well, it doesn't, as there's a 'step' in the middle between the two ladder lengths, which prevents the load being distributed evenly on the tiles. Therefore the lower length needs to have wooden battens wired to it to bring it up to the same line as the upper ladder (does that make sense?)
Secondly, and more significantly, the stays on a normal extended ladder are designed to resist load applied in a downward direction, obviously. So it's easy enough to push the ladder up the roof on its wheels, and then flip it over so the hook engages with the ridge. But then what happens? If you're unlucky, the lower ladder then drops off the bottom of the upper one under the influence of gravity. If you're even unluckier, it waits till you're standing on it before gravity takes effect! Either way, the upper ladder is then marooned half way up the roof. (And no, I didn't get caught out by either pitfall.) The solution, which I had to work out for myself - no mention of any of these issues in the instructions (even to the effect of 'Not to be used with extending ladders', which I would have expected) - was to engage the lower ladder above, rather than below, the stay on the upper ladder, so that it resists force applied in an upward direction instead of downward. But of course the hooks on the stays now don't engage over the rungs; therefore they have to be wired together extremely securely, with plenty of thick gauge wire, so the whole assembly stays put. Not ideal, and although I'm personally 100% confident in the security of what I have set up, there is potentially plenty of scope for causing oneself serious injury.
Having said all that, the roofing hook attachment itself is really good and secure; fixed to a single ladder length I can't see it being any worse than a proper roofing ladder.
Hope this helps somebody else in a similar position!
David
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