Asbestos Ceiling Removal in Teddington

Plenty of houses around the High Street and Broad Street still have their original ceilings, and a fair few of those are coated in textured artex. It was the standard finish for decades, swirled or stippled across ceilings and the tops of walls, and a lot of it went on before asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999. From the floor it looks like nothing more than dated decor, the sort of thing a homeowner plans to skim flat or scrape off one weekend. You cannot tell by looking at it whether the coating holds asbestos fibres or not, and the age of the Teddington terraces means it often does.

The other material we deal with indoors is asbestos insulating board, usually shortened to AIB. In Teddington it tends to show up around boilers, inside airing cupboards, and as flat ceiling panels in rooms that were added or altered over the years. Many of the larger period villas towards Bushy Park and the river were split into flats, and that conversion work often left AIB tucked behind a more recent surface or above a newer ceiling. It looks like ordinary building board until someone goes to move it, which is when the problem starts.

Artex and AIB are not the same risk, and treating them as if they were is where people go wrong. Artex coatings are often lower risk and the work can sometimes be done without a licence, because the fibres are locked into a hard surface. AIB is more friable, it gives off fibres far more readily once it is cut or knocked, and that work is licensed. Because you cannot separate the two by eye, and the two sit in the same houses, the first move is always a sample, not a guess.

Most ceiling jobs in Teddington happen in occupied homes and flats. People are not moving out for a few days of work, so the method has to suit a house that is still being lived in, with the rest of the rooms staying in normal use. We seal off the work area first, taping and sheeting the doorways and any openings so that nothing escapes into the rest of the property. Inside that sealed space we run commercial-grade air filtration the whole time the ceiling is being worked on, which pulls fibres out of the air rather than letting them settle on floors and furniture.

Artex coatings are usually softened and taken off in a controlled way that keeps the dust down, instead of being dry-sanded. AIB panels are removed whole wherever the fixings allow it, so the board is not broken up and made worse inside the room. Everything comes out double-bagged and goes to a licensed disposal facility. There is rarely a skip involved, which matters on the tighter terraced streets off Waldegrave Road where there is nowhere to put one and parking is already at a premium.

Before anyone moves back into the room we carry out air testing. The space is checked to confirm the fibre level is back where it should be, and only then is the seal taken down and the room handed back for use. For a single ceiling that whole process is often wrapped up inside a day, which is part of why people choose to have it done rather than live around it.