Asbestos Floor Tile Removal in Guildford

Most floor work in Guildford starts the same way. Someone is redoing a kitchen in a Stoughton terrace, or pulling up tired carpet in a 1930s semi out towards Burpham, and underneath sits a layer of small square tiles. Thermoplastic and vinyl tiles like these went down in mid-century homes from the 1950s to the 1970s, before the 1999 ban, and the steep Victorian and Edwardian terraces of Charlotteville saw plenty of them added later as ground floors were updated. They hide easily. A carpet or a sheet of lino goes over the top, and the tiles sit there forgotten until the day someone decides to change the floor.

The tiles themselves are usually the easy part. They are hard, nine inches square and two to three millimetres thick, and they lift in whole pieces once they are warmed or eased away from the floor. The problem is what they were stuck down with. Underneath sits a black bitumen adhesive, sometimes called black mastic, bedded into the screed. That adhesive can contain asbestos, and on a Guildford floor it is the bigger headache, more than the tiles sitting on top of it. People expect the tiles to be the worry. More often it is the black layer they have never really looked at.

You cannot tell by looking. Black bitumen adhesive looks like ordinary old glue, and the only way to know what is in it is to take a small sample under controlled conditions and send it to a UKAS-accredited laboratory. Until that result comes back, the sensible thing is to leave the floor alone rather than start scraping at it. A floor that has sat quietly for forty years will wait a few more days for a lab result.

The work area is sealed off from the rest of the home first. For a kitchen or a hallway in an occupied Guildford house, that means closing the room off so dust cannot drift into living rooms and bedrooms while the floor is lifted. Doorways are covered and the space is kept under control before a single tile is touched. The tiles, often several hundred across a single floor, are taken up whole wherever they will come, kept damp, and bagged as they go rather than left to break up underfoot. Broken tiles make more dust and more mess, so the work is steady rather than rushed.

The black bitumen adhesive is then dealt with on the screed. It is kept wet and worked off rather than ground or sanded dry, and everything that comes off the floor is double-bagged and taken away as controlled waste, so nothing is left in a skip on the drive for the neighbours to wonder about. The aim throughout is to keep the dust down where the work is and out of the rest of the house. A typical Guildford kitchen or hallway floor runs to around eight to twelve square metres, and most are lifted and cleared inside a day or two. The screed is left clean enough for whatever new floor is going on top, whether that is tile, board or a poured finish.

The job is not finished when the floor is clear. Air testing is carried out afterwards so there is a written check that the air in the room is clean before anyone moves back in and before the new floor goes down. In a house that is still being lived in, that test is the part that matters most, because it is the difference between assuming the room is safe and knowing it. For a family with young children using that kitchen every day, that written result is worth having.