Asbestos Garage Removal in Dorking

Walk down almost any residential road in Dorking and you will pass dozens of them. A detached or attached garage tucked beside the house, a lean-to at the end of the drive, a workshop or store at the bottom of the garden, and on top of a good many of them sits a wave of grey corrugated sheet. Most owners barely register it. It came with the place, it has been there longer than they have, and it keeps the lawnmower and the bikes dry. The trouble is that across the RH4 and RH5 postcodes a large share of those sheets are asbestos cement, fitted somewhere between the 1950s and the 1980s when the material was cheap, light and sold as fireproof.

Garages got it more than the house itself for a simple reason. Cement sheet was the standard cladding for anything cheap to put up, so the garage, the coal store and the garden shed were exactly where it landed. The houses around them might be Victorian off South Street or interwar semis spreading towards North Holmwood, but the lock-up at the side tends to date from whenever the family last wanted somewhere to keep the car. That is the building we get called to most often, and the roof is nearly always the part that needs to go.

The job is more straightforward than most people fear, which is part of why we like to explain it before we start. A single domestic garage is usually clad in somewhere around eight to fourteen corrugated sheets, each roughly the size of a door, fixed with old hook bolts or nails along the purlins. We lift each sheet off whole rather than cutting or breaking it, because an intact sheet keeps its fibres locked in and the work clean. The bolts are eased out, the sheet is lowered down by hand, and it is double-wrapped in heavy sheeting and sealed before it leaves the ground.

Most single garages in Dorking are stripped and cleared inside a single working day, often a morning. Because the sheets come off whole and go straight onto the van, the great majority of these jobs need no skip at all, so your driveway and the road outside stay clear from start to finish. Garage cement roofing is non-licensed work, so it does not carry the 14 days of HSE notice and full enclosure that higher-risk materials demand, but the controls still apply: no breaking, careful handling, proper wrapping, and the waste consignment notes that prove every sheet went to a licensed disposal facility. If anything found up there looks unusual we will sample it and send it to a UKAS-accredited laboratory before we touch it, because guessing has no place in this work.