Asbestos Floor Tile Removal in Chertsey

Chertsey grew outward in the decades when these floors were standard. The Victorian and Edwardian terraces sit around the centre, along Guildford Street and Windsor Street, and then the interwar and postwar semis and detached houses spread out from there towards Addlestone, Ottershaw and the river. A good number of the larger houses were later carved up into flats. In the kitchens, hallways and downstairs rooms across that whole spread, the original covering was the 9 inch thermoplastic or vinyl tile, bedded onto a concrete screed with a black bitumen adhesive.

The tiles themselves are the smaller part of the problem. They sit flat and solid, and left alone they give off very little. It is the black sticky layer beneath, the bitumen, that tends to carry the asbestos and grips hard onto the screed. Over the years carpet went down on top, or a sheet of vinyl, and the tiles and their adhesive stayed put and got forgotten. They only come back into view when something disturbs them, which on a domestic floor means a tool, not time.

That moment is nearly always a refit. The lino comes up, or the carpet and underlay are lifted out for a new kitchen, and there is the old tiled floor staring back. Some of the older properties down near the Thames and Chertsey Bridge have had damp to deal with as well, and a floor that has softened or started to lift brings the same two materials, the tile and the bitumen, straight to the surface where someone has to make a decision about them.

The work stays on the floor and it stays inside one room. That room is sealed off from the rest of the house with sheeting taped over the doorways, and a vent runs to the outside so the working space sits under negative pressure and air is drawn inward rather than leaking out. Anyone living in the house keeps clear of that room from the moment the floor goes up. The materials come out whole or in manageable sections wherever the floor allows, double bagged as they go, and carried off to a licensed disposal site rather than dropped in a skip on the drive, so the front of the house and the road stay clear throughout.

The tiles come up first. Then the bitumen, the part that takes the real time, is taken back off the screed under those same controlled conditions, scraped and cleaned down until the slab is bare. A single kitchen or hallway floor is frequently a few hours of work once the enclosure is built and the air is moving, while a longer run of connected rooms, or a floor that has been patched and re-covered more than once, will take a full day or more. The screed is left clean and dry and ready for whatever new floor is going down on top.

With the floor clear, the air in the room is tested before the enclosure is taken down and before anyone moves back in. Bitumen adhesive on a domestic floor is in many cases non-licensed work, but that is something the sample decides, never something assumed at the door. If a sample points instead to a higher-risk licensed material, the job steps straight up to the stricter standard: 14 days of notice given to the HSE, a full sealed enclosure built around the work, and a four-stage clearance signed off at the end by an independent analyst who has had no part in the removal itself.