Commercial Scaffolding – Shore School House

Recently Stronghold Hire were engaged to provide a scaffold for a full re-roof at Shore School House in North Sydney. Established in 1889 by the Church of England, Shore School now caters for approximately 1,600 students.

Scaffolding in Schools – Understanding the Rules

Many of the school projects that Stronghold Hire undertake are usually carried out within the school holiday time periods. Due to the size of this building within the grounds it was simply too big to confine to this holiday period. We therefore had to start installing the scaffold during normal school operating days.

Scaffolding Without Disruption

The first challenge for us was to be able to deliver, move and erect the scaffold whilst still causing minimum disruption to the school staff and students. After months of planning and communication with the school we were able to agree on a safe way of achieving this without going outside the time frame that was allocated.

Methods To Reduce Disruption

We used methods such as:

• Pedestrian control
• Spotters
• Overhead protection areas
• Re-routing and isolation of commonly used areas
• Unusual material delivery times
• Staged scaffold installations
• Minimum storage compounds

We also agreed to work outside normal working hours for certain areas of the building to limit this inconvenience.

Steel & Aluminium Kwik-stage Scaffolding System

For the scaffolding system we decided to use steel Kwik-stage scaffold for this project on all external faces that we could take from the floor. There were some lower slate roofs that we also needed to scaffold over. These were too long to suspend so we decided to use our light weight aluminium kwik-stage system across them. We worked in with the roof installers so that we were able to use the main roof joists to take most of the weight.

Ladder Beams to Suspend Scaffold

We could access most of the main tower by transferring the weight directly to the floor but around 30% of the elevations were over low roofs. The tower was too high to use the aluminium kwik stage in these areas so, with the help of our engineer we were able to suspend this scaffold using ladder beams.

No Wall Anchors, No Problem!

The last challenge that we had was that we were not given permission to use wall anchors to tie the scaffold. We overcame this by erecting buttress bays where possible and tying the scaffold though windows using protected tube and fitting.

Scaffolding With The Compliments

The client then provided carpenters to weatherproof and secure the windows affected. This project has been another success for Stronghold Hire with compliments from the client, the school and the contractors using the scaffold.