Asbestos Floor Tile Removal in Leatherhead

Hardly anyone in Leatherhead sets out to remove asbestos floor tiles. The call almost always comes mid-job. A kitchen is being ripped out in one of the postwar semis around Fetcham, or a tired carpet is lifted in an older house near the High Street, and there underneath is a grid of small, hard floor tiles nobody knew was there. They are usually nine inches square, often a dull brown, green or grey, and they have sat quietly under newer flooring for decades.

Those tiles are thermoplastic or vinyl, and a lot of the ones laid before the late 1980s contain asbestos. The fibres are locked into the tile itself, so while it stays whole and bonded to the floor it is doing no harm. The problem starts when someone takes a bolster and a hammer to it, or runs a floor scraper across it, and the old tiles begin to crack and chip. That is the moment a routine floor refit in a KT22 or KT23 home turns into something that needs handling properly. We see this pattern right across the town. The interwar and postwar semis out towards Fetcham, Ashtead and Bookham went up when these tiles were a cheap, hard-wearing floor, so they turn up in kitchens, hallways, utility rooms and downstairs toilets all over the KT22 and KT23 postcodes. The older homes nearer the High Street and the Mole often have them too, layered under a succession of later floors. Most owners have no idea they are there until the day a refit starts.

It cannot be settled by eye. Two floors that look the same can come back from the lab differently, so if tiles like these turn up in a Leatherhead property we take a small sample under controlled conditions and send it to a UKAS-accredited laboratory before any of it is lifted. The sample is by far the cheap part of the whole job, and it is what stops a kitchen or hallway refit running on guesswork. Results usually come back within a few working days, and only then do we really know how that particular floor needs to be handled.

Floor tile work is almost always done in a home people are still living in, often the busiest room in it. A Leatherhead kitchen or hallway connects to everywhere else, so before anything is lifted we seal the room off and close the routes the dust would otherwise take, the doorways, the gaps under doors and any vents.

With the room sealed we run commercial-grade air filtration while the tiles and the adhesive come up, so the fine dust is pulled out of the air rather than drifting through the property. The work stays inside that contained zone from start to finish, and the waste goes out as asbestos waste to a licensed facility, not in with the kitchen rubble. The tiles and scraped adhesive are double-bagged as they come up rather than left in a pile on the floor, and floors next to busy parts of a Leatherhead home, a hallway feeding the stairs or a kitchen opening onto a living room, get the most care over the seals, because those are the routes dust would travel furthest if it got loose.

When the floor is clear and the screed is clean, the air in the room is tested before anyone moves back in. That air test is the part that matters in an occupied house. It confirms the room is safe to use again rather than just looking tidy, which counts for a great deal when it is the family kitchen the children walk through every morning.