Asbestos Shed Removal in Guildford

Almost every garden in the older parts of Guildford has one. A small grey building at the end of the path, sometimes a shed, sometimes a coal bunker, sometimes an outside store that was tacked onto the back of the house in 1962 and has held a lawnmower ever since.

Asbestos cement was the cheap, fireproof, rot-proof way to build one, and it was used everywhere until the mid 1980s. Sixty years on, most of them are past useful life and the owner wants the space.

Recognising one

Garden buildings used both corrugated and flat asbestos cement, which is why sheds catch people out more often than garages do.

Corrugated is the obvious one: the same wide shallow wave as a garage roof, usually with hook bolts through the crests.

Flat sheet is harder. It looks like a plain grey board, roughly six or eight millimetres thick, bolted to a light timber or angle-iron frame with washers under the heads. It goes green at the bottom where it sits in the damp and it often has a slightly fibrous look along any cut edge. Modern cement board looks similar, which is precisely the problem.

Two things point strongly to asbestos: bolts rather than nails, because the sheet is too brittle to nail, and a manufacturer's name pressed into an inside face. If the shed came with the house and the house predates 2000, treat it as suspect until a photo or a sample says otherwise. Only a lab test is proof, and a sample and test costs a fraction of a survey if you want certainty on one material.

What it costs

£400 to £600 for a typical garden shed. That range is a floor rather than an opening bid, and it is worth understanding why.

Below a certain size the cost stops being about the material. It is the visit, the sheeting, the wrapping, the hazardous waste disposal charge and the paperwork. A four-by-six shed and a six-by-eight shed are not meaningfully different jobs. That is why a very small structure rarely comes in much under £400 and why it is often worth clearing two at once.

Above the range: a shed a barrow cannot reach, a shed that has partly collapsed so the sheet is already broken, a shed still full, and a base you want taken up.

If yours is a larger outbuilding, a workshop or a stable rather than a garden shed, the pricing moves to a per-square-metre basis at around £50 per square metre and the job is asbestos roof removal or a full outbuilding strip. The cost page sets out both.

The tip route, honestly

People ask whether they can just take it to the tip, and the honest answer is that it is usually more trouble than it saves.

Household waste recycling centres in Surrey and Hampshire that accept asbestos apply limits: a maximum quantity per visit, a requirement that it arrives double-wrapped and labelled, and in most cases a booking. Acceptance rules genuinely differ between sites and between councils, and they change, so the only reliable move is to check your specific site before you load anything.

A whole shed is normally more than one visit's allowance. Add van hire, heavy-duty polythene, tape and a respirator, plus the fact that dismantling flat sheet without cracking it is fiddly, and the saving against £400 to £600 tends to disappear. It is your call and it is legal. It is just rarely the bargain it looks like.

Coal bunkers, outside stores and the rest

Not everything in this category is a shed, and the ones that are not tend to be the ones people forget about.

Coal bunkers are the classic. Small, square, often built against a back wall with a hinged lid and a hatch at the bottom, and made of exactly the same flat cement sheet. Thousands went up on Surrey estates in the 1950s and 1960s and a lot are still there behind a shrub, holding nothing but leaves.

Outside toilets and outside stores are the other one. Where a small brick outbuilding was added to the back of a house, the roof and sometimes an internal lining panel were often cement sheet. The brick shell is ordinary and stays. The sheet is the part that needs handling.

Then there are prefabricated garden buildings that are not garages and not quite sheds: greenhouse bases, dog kennels, sectional stores, the panel walls of an old rabbit run. If it is grey, rigid, bolted rather than nailed, and it came with a pre-2000 house, it is worth a photograph.

Two at once is cheaper than two separately

Worth saying plainly, because it saves people money and nobody volunteers it.

A large part of what you pay on a small job is the visit itself. Travel, setting up, the disposal run, the paperwork. Two sheds on the same morning, whether both are yours or one belongs to a neighbour, share almost all of that.

If someone on your street has the same grey shed and has been putting it off, it is genuinely worth asking. The same is true of a shed and a garage roof at the same address, which is one job rather than two visits.

What happens on the day

The shed is emptied, or the contents are covered if you are keeping them in place. The structure is damped down. Bolts are cut rather than driven out, and panels come away whole and go straight into wrapping.

Flat sheet is the part that needs patience. It is brittle, it is often bolted at every edge, and it cracks if it is twisted. Taking it slowly is the difference between three wrapped panels and a bag of fragments that costs more to dispose of and takes longer to clean up.

The ground underneath gets checked. Fragments collect at the base of the walls and in the grass line around the pad, and that is the bit a rushed job leaves behind.

Then the load goes out on a registered vehicle to a permitted site, and you get the hazardous waste consignment note. Keep it for at least three years.

Around Guildford

Sheds and coal stores of this type are concentrated in the same places as the garage roofs: the post-war council-built estates at Park Barn, Bellfields and Stoughton, where outside stores were standard, and the 1930s to 1970s stock at Burpham, Merrow and Onslow Village.

Access is the whole story on a shed job. A front-accessed bungalow in Merrow with a gate wide enough for a barrow is a comfortable half-day. A Victorian terrace near the town centre where everything has to come through the house is the same shed and a considerably slower morning, and it is worth saying so when you ask for a price rather than discovering it on the day.

We work across Guildford and the surrounding towns, from Woking and Leatherhead through to Godalming, Cranleigh, Haslemere and Dorking, and west to Farnham, Aldershot and Farnborough. The areas we cover page lists them.