Sure you could use a ladder to paint your house, but you'll look as daft as The Chuckle Brothers and it'll take you ages to get the job done. 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 sublime building time. 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. (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!) (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. 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). No experience or special tools are needed to construct it; there's no need for your neighbours to know about that though. 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. . 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. 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! 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. This is where your scaffold tower comes into its own. 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. 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. Iron on labels, stick on labels and wash marker pens have every one of the been created to render life faster and additionally easier for hard-working moms an . But as a smart buyer, you should also learn how to control your buying impulses and first read other product reviews before buying anything.