Asbestos Garage Removal in Woking

Drive down almost any residential street in Knaphill, Goldsworth Park or Sheerwater and you will pass row after row of detached and semi-detached garages, most of them topped with the same grey corrugated cement sheet. They went up alongside the interwar and postwar housing that filled in Woking after the railway town spread out from its 1838 station, and a great many of them are still wearing their original roof. That sheet is where the asbestos sits.

For decades nobody thought twice about it. Corrugated cement was cheap, light and easy to fix to a timber frame, so builders used it on lock-up garages, lean-to car ports and garden sheds across the GU21 and GU22 postcodes. The trouble is that most of these roofs were fitted somewhere between the 1950s and the 1980s and have been weathering on a Woking back garden ever since. Forty or fifty winters of frost and sun leave the surface chalky and the edges crumbling, and a brittle sheet is far easier to break than a sound one.

Left alone and intact, that roof is doing no harm. It is the moment someone decides to take it down with a hammer and a borrowed van that the danger starts, because breaking the sheet is what puts fibres into the air. The same goes for the garage that has finally started to leak, or the one a new owner of an Old Woking or Horsell house wants gone to make room for an extension. As soon as the sheet is disturbed it stops being a quiet bit of roofing and becomes a job that needs doing right. Clearaway Asbestos handles the garage roof properly, so the material leaves your Woking property in one piece rather than as dust.

Most single garages in Woking are roofed with somewhere between eight and a dozen corrugated sheets, each panel running roughly two to three metres long. The aim from the start is to lift every one of them down whole. An intact sheet keeps its fibres locked in, so we unbolt and ease the panels off the frame in one piece rather than cutting or snapping them, then wrap and stack them ready to go to a licensed disposal facility.

Because the sheets come off whole and are loaded straight onto our own vehicle, most jobs need no skip at all. That matters on the tighter Woking streets and the shared driveways around the postwar estates, where a skip would block a neighbour in or sit on the road for days. It also keeps the mess off your drive, since nothing is being broken up on site and there is nothing left to sweep away once we have gone. A standard single garage is usually stripped and cleared inside a single working day, often in three to four hours of actual work, with the drive and the road left clear when we leave.

With the asbestos gone we check the area over before anything new goes up. If you want the garage back in use, we fit a replacement roof to match the building, whether that is galvanised steel box-profile, three-layer torch-on felt, a flat or tiled roof, or asbestos-free fibre cement. Box-profile steel is the usual pick for a working garage because it goes up quickly and sheds Woking rain well, while fibre cement keeps the look of the original without the asbestos. Where you would rather cover and protect a sound roof than replace it, boxing out is an option too.