Asbestos Floor Tile Removal in Cobham

Most floor tile jobs in Cobham start the same way. Someone is redoing a kitchen off the High Street, or stripping a tired hallway in one of the interwar semis out towards the Fairmile, and the carpet or the sheet lino lifts to show a layer of small, hard tiles underneath. They are usually nine inches square, often a dull brown, green or grey, laid in a tight grid, and they have been sitting there since long before anyone in the house was born. In Cobham, where so much of the stock went up before asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999, that older flooring is worth a second look before anyone takes a bolster to it. The tiles get missed because they hide. A carpet goes over them, then years later a buyer pulls the carpet up and there they are, a floor nobody remembers laying.

The tiles themselves are thermoplastic or vinyl, and the asbestos in them is bound tight in the material. Left whole and walked on, they sit there doing nothing, which is why so many have survived in Cobham homes for decades without anyone giving them a thought. The risk shows up when they are smashed up, ground off, or sanded back, because that is when the fibres can break loose into the air of a room people are living in. A floor that has survived seventy years of furniture and feet can be turned into a hazard in an afternoon with the wrong tool, and the worst of it is that the fibres are far too fine to see, so the person doing the damage has no idea anything is wrong. That is the part most people never think about until the tiles are already in pieces.

It is the same story in flats and converted homes as it is in the houses, and Cobham has plenty of both. Wherever an old floor has been laid over rather than taken up, the original tiles can still be down there under newer vinyl, laminate or a layer of self-levelling compound. So the first thing worth doing in any older property is simply finding out what is under your feet before you decide to disturb it.

A floor sits in the middle of a working home, often the kitchen or a hallway that everything else opens off, so the whole job is about keeping the work inside the one space. We seal the room before we start, screen off the doorways, and run commercial-grade air filtration so nothing drifts into the rest of the house while the floor is coming up. That matters more with a floor than with most things, because a kitchen or hall connects to everywhere, and dust left to wander would carry straight into the living room and up the stairs. The tiles are taken up in whole pieces wherever they will lift that way, kept damp to hold the dust down, and double-wrapped rather than broken out.

The adhesive comes off by controlled methods rather than dry grinding, so the bitumen is removed without firing fibres into the air. Everything is bagged as it goes, the tiles and the glued waste together, and carried out to a licensed disposal facility. When the floor is back to bare, clean screed we test the air before anyone returns to the room, so the family is not breathing in what the old floor left behind. Only once that air test is clear is the room handed back and the seals taken down. A typical domestic floor in a Cobham home is dealt with inside a day, though a larger ground floor, or a badly stuck adhesive layer that fights every inch, can run longer.