Scraping Asbestos Siding

Advice for painting fiber cement or asbestos cement building shingles or siding.

Scraping asbestos siding.

These are easily prepared and easy to repaint. Sanding asbestos products siding floor tile etc is also unsafe but your painter should have no need for sanding. When you say asbestos shingles i presume you mean asbestos siding shingles. Scraping or brushing off old paint from asbestos siding is necessary before repainting but dangerous because it can release small asbestos fibres the approach of removing the old shingles and replacing them with new siding is an option that many homeowners have pursued though probably not as safely as they should.

Results typically take two weeks after the lab receives the sample. Besides the need to create a good surface for painting asbestos siding there are two other areas of concern. Latex products won t stick to chalk alkyds will. If you hire the job out painting asbestos siding doesn t require any special licensing as far as the contractor doing the work so you.

The asbestos is locked into the siding so if a very miniscule amount were to escape into the air i wouldn t consider it a hazard even indoors. Use an exterior oil primer and. Since asbestos is only dangerous when it is in a friable state you will remove the paint without sanding or scraping. Using a respirator rated for asbestos and disposable tyvek suits is likely overkill for painting asbestos siding but they are definitely necessary when removing siding but peace of mind is priceless especially if your significant other insists.

In our page top photo of badly peeling paint on fiber cement lap siding we suspect that the wrong paint was used the paint was improperly mixed a primer was needed or the paint was applied over a chalked or damp surface. Normally you d scrap down the old paint from your siding but doing that with asbestos can release dangerous particles into the air. You can purchase a home based asbestos testing kit that allows you to scrape off a small section of the texture product and mail it to a lab for testing. Or you can hire an asbestos remediation professional to do this for you.

You can power wash any loose paint or simply scrape and remove any. Begin by analyzing a paint sample for lead content. Use a water blaster for the large pieces and allow the siding to dry thoroughly. Often since asbestos siding holds paint so well there won t be any but if there is it you must remove it before you can repaint.

This presents a problem when it s time to repaint the exterior of the house. The asbestos i worry about is the loose powdery type used to wrap pipes and such.