Asbestos Garage Removal in Staines

The suburban plots out towards Laleham and Egham Hythe were laid out with room for a car, and that usually meant a separate garage at the side or bottom of the drive. Plenty of them are still standing, often with the same roof they were given when they went up. If yours has a low pitch covered in grey corrugated sheets that have gone chalky and streaked with moss, you are almost certainly looking at asbestos cement. It was the cheap, fireproof, easy-to-fix choice from the 1950s through to the 1980s, and on a Staines plot it is the most common place we find asbestos. The same sheets turn up on garden sheds, lean-tos and the odd outbuilding, but the detached or semi-detached garage is the classic one.

The cement itself is hard, and the fibres stay locked inside while the sheet is sound. The trouble is age. Sixty or seventy winters this close to the river have left these roofs brittle, cracked along the ridges and soft where water has been sitting in the corrugations. The fixing holes go rusty and oversize, the sheets start to sag between the purlins, and the surface weathers down until the fibres sit nearer the top than they did. A roof in that state is the kind that lets go, and the riskiest moment is almost always someone climbing up to clear leaves, free a gutter or drape a tarpaulin over a leak. That is the point to stop and have it taken down properly rather than patched again.

You cannot reliably tell asbestos cement from a modern fibre cement copy by eye, because the later asbestos-free sheets were made to look almost identical. The age of the garage is the strongest clue you have. If the plot and the house are pre-1980s and the garage looks original to it, the safe assumption is that the roof is asbestos until a sample says otherwise. It is not a reason to panic, just a reason not to drill it, cut it or walk on it in the meantime.

A garage with the roof off needs covering again, and there are a few sensible routes depending on what you want from the building and what you are happy to spend. Galvanised steel box-profile is the usual swap on a pitched garage. It goes on fast, it is light enough not to overload the old walls, and it gives you back a weatherproof roof in the same single-pitch shape the garage was built for. For a flat or near-flat garage roof, a three-layer torch-on felt system is the standard, hard-wearing answer, and done well it will outlast the sheets it replaced. If you want something that reads more like part of the house rather than an outbuilding, a tiled roof or a properly built warm flat roof is an option worth pricing. And if you simply want the same look without the asbestos, modern asbestos-free fibre cement sheets give you a like-for-like grey corrugated finish.

Where the old sheets met the verges, the eaves or a neighbouring wall, we can box out and seal the exposed timber and edges so the new roof is tidy and watertight rather than left raw and open to the weather. That boxing out is often the difference between a roof that looks finished and one that looks like a quick fix. The aim is that you walk away with a garage you can actually use and keep, not a stripped shell that becomes next year's problem.

We will talk through which covering suits your garage and your budget before anything is ordered, so the replacement is a decision you have made rather than one made for you. Some people want the cheapest sound roof that keeps the car and the lawnmower dry. Others are tidying up the whole plot before a sale and want something that lifts the look from the road. Either is fine, but it is worth deciding before the old roof comes off so the new one can follow on without the garage sitting open.