Home › In the home › Ceilings, internal wall sheeting and wet areas

Ceilings, internal wall sheeting and wet areas

By · Updated

Indoors changes the arithmetic. The same sheet that is a manageable problem outside is a contaminated room when someone takes a grinder to it in a space with the windows shut.

('

Asbestos cement went indoors wherever water was expected, because it did not rot and did not swell. That puts it in a short, predictable list of rooms — and unfortunately it is the same list of rooms people most want to renovate.

Where it turns up

  • Bathroom and laundry wall linings, often behind tiles, which is how a straightforward re-tile becomes a different job.
  • Ceilings, both flat sheet and, in some houses, textured or decorative coatings.
  • Around the kitchen sink and stove, as splashbacks and heat-resistant panels.
  • The electrical meter box backing board — small, easy to forget, and disturbed by every switchboard upgrade.
  • Behind wood heaters and hot water units, as heat shielding.

Why indoors is different

Outdoors, fibre disperses. Indoors it does not: it settles, it gets walked through, and it sits in carpet and soft furnishings. A room with the windows shut and an angle grinder going is the worst-case scenario in domestic asbestos, and it is a scenario created entirely by the person holding the tool.

This is why the internal materials deserve more caution than their small area suggests, and why the sequence is always the same: work out what it is before the demolition starts, not when the tiles are already off.

The renovation trap

The classic sequence runs like this. Someone decides to re-tile a 1970s bathroom. The tiles come off, taking chunks of the lining with them. The lining turns out to be asbestos cement. By that point there is broken material in the room, dust on every surface, and a household that has been walking through it.

Preventing that costs one sample and a few days. It is the single best-value decision in this whole subject.

Textured ceilings

Decorative textured ceiling coatings are worth singling out because they behave differently from flat sheet. They are applied rather than fixed, they are thicker and softer, and where they contain asbestos they sit closer to the friable end than a cement sheet does. Scraping, sanding or water-blasting one is emphatically not a weekend job, and a ceiling in poor condition is a reason to get advice rather than a reason to start.

The meter box

Small but persistent. The backing board behind an older electrical meter box is frequently asbestos cement, and it comes up whenever a switchboard is upgraded or a solar system is installed. Electricians in Australia are generally alert to it — if yours raises it, that is competence rather than an upsell.

What to do instead of demolishing

Where the material is intact, covering rather than removing is often legitimate: a new lining over the top, or new flooring over an old floor, leaves the original undisturbed. The condition attached to doing that honestly is recording it, so the next owner or tradesperson is not ambushed by what is behind the new surface.

', 0)

Frequently asked questions

What is behind the tiles in an older bathroom?

Frequently asbestos cement sheeting, because it did not rot in wet areas. That is why a re-tile in a pre-1990 bathroom is worth settling before demolition rather than during it.

Why is indoor asbestos treated more seriously than outdoor?

Fibre disperses outdoors and settles indoors. In a closed room it lands on surfaces, carpet and furnishings and gets walked through afterwards, so the same material creates a much longer-lived problem.

Are textured ceilings a problem?

They deserve extra caution. Textured coatings are applied rather than fixed and sit closer to the friable end than flat cement sheet, so scraping, sanding or water-blasting one is not a homeowner job.

Can I leave it and build over the top?

Covering intact material rather than removing it is often a legitimate approach. The condition is that you record what is underneath, so the next owner or tradesperson is not surprised by it.

Sources

What this page explains is based on these official sources. If you check one and it does not match what you read here, send it to us and the article gets corrected.

Keep reading