Asbestos Garage Removal in Chertsey

Drive around the postwar streets off Guildford Street and Windsor Street, or out towards the semis and detached houses spreading from the centre, and you keep seeing the same thing. A single garage or lock-up beside the house, low pitched, with a roof of grey corrugated sheeting that has gone green and brittle at the edges. Most of these went up between the 1950s and the 1980s, when cement sheet reinforced with asbestos was the cheap, quick way to cover a garage or a shed. It was light, it was rigid, and at the time nobody thought twice about it.

Those same sheets are still up there on a lot of Chertsey drives, decades past their fitting and decades of Surrey weather on top. The river sits right there, the M25 and M3 throw damp and frost across the town all winter, and corrugated cement does not cope well with forty or fifty years of that. The surface goes chalky, hairline cracks open along the corrugations, and moss works into the laps. Cement asbestos sheeting was not banned in the UK until 1999, so anything from before then is suspect until it has been checked.

You cannot tell what is in it by looking, which is the whole problem. A weathered garage roof that has cracked and shed its surface is exactly the kind of material that releases fibres when it is disturbed, and a garage is the one bit of the property people are forever drilling into, leaning ladders on, or knocking about during a clear-out. Pressure washing one of these roofs or walking on it to clear a gutter is the worst thing you can do, because that is the moment fibres come loose. Left alone it sits there quietly. The trouble starts the day someone decides to deal with it themselves.

Before any sheet comes off, a small piece can be taken under controlled conditions and sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory, which confirms whether it is asbestos cement and comes back in a few working days. That keeps everyone honest about what is being handled and how it has to be removed. It is a cheap step and it settles the question properly rather than by guesswork.

Once the old roof is gone you are left with a bare frame, and there are a few sensible ways to recover a Chertsey garage. Galvanised steel box-profile sheeting is the common like-for-like swap, with the 0.7mm gauge being a solid choice that will outlast the old cement by a wide margin. A three-layer torch-on felt system suits a flatter garage roof and seals it well against the rain coming off the river side of town. Some owners go for asbestos-free fibre cement that keeps the original look, others for a tiled or flat finish to match the house. Where exposed timbers or a soffit have also been boxed in with cement board, that can be stripped and boxed back out at the same time so the whole structure is sound and clean.

The purlins and the wall plate are worth a proper look once the sheets are off, because forty years under a leaking cement roof can leave timber soft or rotten in places. Any that has gone is better replaced before the new covering goes on, rather than sheeting straight over a weak frame. Done that way a recovered Chertsey garage roof should see out the rest of the building and never need touching for asbestos again.