Asbestos Garage Removal in Cobham

Drive around the KT11 streets off the Portsmouth Road and you will pass dozens of them: the detached garage at the side of the house, or the lock-up at the end of a shared drive, with a low corrugated roof that has gone grey and mossy over the years. In Cobham these sit behind everything from the period houses near Church Street and the High Street to the interwar and postwar homes out towards Oxshott, Stoke D'Abernon and the Fairmile. Most were thrown up as an afterthought once the house was built, somewhere between the 1950s and the 1980s, and the roof was almost always corrugated asbestos cement because it was cheap, light and easy to bolt on.

That is the single most common asbestos call we get across this part of Elmbridge. Not the house itself, but the structure next to it. People notice it when the garage starts to leak, when a sheet cracks in a winter storm, or when they are clearing the place out and want it gone. The material was fine for decades. It is the age, the weather and the moment someone decides to lever a sheet off that turns a tired roof into a problem worth handling properly.

The shed at the bottom of the garden tends to be the same story. A small pitched roof of the same corrugated sheet, fitted at the same time, left to weather under the trees. We treat both the same way and often clear the garage and the shed on one visit, because the materials and the method are identical even if the buildings are not. If you have a garage roof in Cobham that predates 2000, it is worth assuming there is asbestos cement up there until a sample says otherwise. Better to know before you start clearing the place out than to find out halfway through with a broken sheet in your hands.

A standard single garage roof in Cobham is usually somewhere around ten to fourteen corrugated sheets, depending on the pitch and the length of the building. We unbolt and lift each one down in one piece, double-wrap it on site, and carry it straight to a licensed disposal point. Taking the sheets whole is the part that matters: nothing gets cut or smashed, so the fibres never get loose across your drive or your neighbour's.

Because the wrapped sheets go directly into the van, most domestic garages need no skip at all, which means the drive and the road outside stay clear and there is no eyesore left sitting on the kerb for a week. The bulk of single garage roofs are stripped, cleared and tidied inside one working day, often in three to five hours from arriving to driving away. Larger double garages or lock-up rows take longer, but the same principle holds: whole sheets, contained, gone the same visit wherever we can manage it.

For the great majority of these garage roofs the work is non-licensed, which is why it moves so quickly. If a sample ever comes back as a higher-risk licensed material, the rules change: we give the HSE the 14 days of notice the law requires, work under full enclosure, and finish with four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst before anyone uses the space again. Most garage owners never need that route, but we will always tell you straight which one yours falls under.