Asbestos Floor Tile Removal in Sutton

Sutton grew quickly once the railway arrived in 1847, and the streets really filled in between the wars. So a lot of the housing here is interwar semi-detached, with the kind of solid ground floors that builders later covered in small thermoplastic or vinyl tiles. You find them in the hall, the kitchen, the back scullery, sometimes a downstairs loo. They were cheap, hard-wearing and went down by the thousand across Cheam, Carshalton and Worcester Park. The same tiles turn up in the postwar estates around those areas, and in Belmont and the higher ground out towards Banstead, where the housing follows the same pattern.

Most people never see the tiles themselves. They have been hidden under lino, then under carpet, then under whatever the last owner laid on top. It is only when a floor comes up that the original surface appears again. In the older Victorian and Edwardian houses near the centre and around Carshalton's village core and ponds, the same thing happens once you get past the suspended timber and reach a later patched-in slab. A square of small, brittle tiles in a regular grid is the usual giveaway, often in a brown, cream or dull green that nobody would choose now.

The tiles are one thing. The black, tar-like glue stuck to the floor underneath them is the part that matters more, and it is the reason this is rarely a simple lift-and-bin job. A floor that looked like a quick afternoon can turn into the bit of the refit nobody planned for, which is why it helps to know what you are looking at before the first tile comes up.

Most Sutton floor jobs happen while the family is still living in the house, so the work has to be contained rather than treated like a building site. We seal the room off from the rest of the home, set up commercial-grade air filtration to keep any dust inside that one space, and work methodically across the floor. The tiles are lifted carefully rather than smashed, and kept whole as far as possible. The bitumen adhesive is taken up using methods that keep it intact instead of grinding it into powder, so the screed underneath is left clean and ready for whatever new floor is going down.

Kitchens and hallways are the usual rooms in these interwar semis, and they tend to be the through-routes everyone uses, so we plan the job to clear the space and hand it back the same way it was found. Nothing is dragged through the living areas, and the work area stays shut off until it has been checked. The tiles and the glue residue are double-bagged as asbestos waste and removed properly, not left by the bins or put out with the household rubbish. A floor in one of these semis is rarely huge, so a single room is often a day or so of work rather than a drawn-out job.

Once the floor and glue are out, the room is air tested before anyone uses it again. That is the step that confirms the air is clean and the seals did their job, and it is not something to take on trust. Only when the result is clear does the room come back into normal use, ready for the new flooring to go down on a sound, clean screed.