Acrophobia 101

It's been instructional watching the guys put up the scaffolding.

These things are apparently a lot sturdier than they look. Because they sure don't look all that safe to me.

Here's the delivery truck parked outside the house. That's one day's worth of scaffolding. They had to come back the next day to deliver more. This load about covered the ground floor and part of the second floor.

It seems obvious now, but I'd never really thought about it before. Every scaffolding job is different. It's like real-time architecture. The guys have to decide on the spot how they're going to arrange everything, where the footings go, how to connect the platforms together so you can walk around the house, how to climb up or down from one level to the next, and so on. Watching them do it, you'd think they had it all planned out and just have to haul the materials in place. But really, they're making it up as they go along, dealing with uneven ground (and my ditches), irregular building shape, varying roof heights, wind direction, and everything else. It's pretty impressive, really.

They're also really good at not dropping things. Here, the guy on the bottom has just tossed a steel rod to the guy up top -- 35 feet straight up. Just try pitching a softball directly over your head; it's not easy. Now try it with something heavy without killing yourself.

By Day 2 they'd finished most of the house, including the top floor, as you can see here. It was a bit strange being inside the house and watching this stuff slowly creep upwards past your window. It's not a noisy process, so I couldn't always tell where they were or what part they were working on. Scaffolding would just appear out the window.

People, too. Here's one of the guys blithely standing outside my window -- on the third floor. He's three stories up, unattached to anything, building the very platform he's standing on. With no safety rail (yet). No hard hat, either, but really, what good would that do?

Trivia: When you rent scaffolding, you get it for 57 days. They won't rent it for shorter periods than that, even if you only need it for a few days. Most customers are plasterers, not painters, and plaster takes several weeks to set, hence the two-month minimum. In our case, that means we can keep the scaffolding longer than we need to, getting a "free" month. We plan to use that time to fix the wooden gutters and hang Christmas lights. Why not? We're not likely to do this again anytime soon.