Asbestos Garage Removal in Putney

Putney is mostly terraces and flats, so the lock-up garage is not the first thing people picture here. Look past the dense streets running down to the Thames, though, and you find them: the bigger period houses up towards West Hill and Putney Heath, the homes with side returns and rear plots on the Dover House and Ashburton estates, the detached and semi-detached stock set back off the Upper Richmond Road. Plenty of those have a garage or a workshop down the side, and a good number of them are still wearing a corrugated cement roof.

Those roofs went on roughly between the 1950s and the 1980s, when asbestos cement was the cheap, standard way to cover a garage, a shed or a lean-to. The big grey sheets with the rolling profile are the giveaway. They were fitted long before asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999, and most have been sitting out in the weather for forty or fifty years since.

Left alone and in one piece, that roof is not doing much harm. The problem starts the moment someone climbs up to clear the gutter, drills a fixing, or decides to pull the lot off over a weekend. Old cement sheet is brittle. It cracks and crumbles, and when it does it lets go of fibres that you cannot see and cannot smell.

A standard single garage roof is usually somewhere around ten to fourteen cement sheets, depending on the length and pitch. A double or a longer workshop run is more. We take the sheets down whole from the fixings, working from the eaves up, keep them damped down so nothing flakes off, and wrap and bag each one as it comes off rather than stacking broken pieces on the ground.

Most single garages are a single day on site, often a morning, from the first sheet to a swept, cleared roof structure. There is normally no skip, the sheets leave on our own vehicle, and the drive is back to normal by the end of the day. Because a garage roof is unlicensed work in most cases, there is no fourteen day wait hanging over it, so we can usually book it in without a long lead time.

With the asbestos gone you are left with the bare timber frame, and that is the moment to decide on a new cover. The common choices are galvanised steel box-profile, which is quick and light, three-layer torch-on felt for a flat or shallow roof, a proper flat or tiled finish, or asbestos-free fibre cement if you want to keep the original look. Where there is asbestos-cement guttering or boxing on the garage as well, that can be boxed out or replaced at the same time so it is all dealt with in one visit.